Untargeted Jailbreak Attack

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Xinzhe, Hu, Wenjing, Zheng, Tianhang, Xiu, Kedong, Jia, Xiaojun, Wang, Di, Qin, Zhan, Ren, Kui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912936209940480
author Huang, Xinzhe
Hu, Wenjing
Zheng, Tianhang
Xiu, Kedong
Jia, Xiaojun
Wang, Di
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
author_facet Huang, Xinzhe
Hu, Wenjing
Zheng, Tianhang
Xiu, Kedong
Jia, Xiaojun
Wang, Di
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
contents Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses. However, restricting the objective as inducing fixed targets inherently constrains the adversarial search space, limiting the overall attack efficacy. Furthermore, existing methods typically require numerous optimization iterations to fulfill the large gap between the fixed target and the original LLM output, resulting in low attack efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first gradient-based untargeted jailbreak attack (UJA), which relies on an untargeted objective to maximize the unsafety probability of the LLM output, without enforcing any response patterns. For tractable optimization, we further decompose this objective into two differentiable sub-objectives to search the optimal harmful response and the corresponding adversarial prompt, with a theoretical analysis to validate the decomposition. In contrast to existing attacks, UJA's unrestricted objective significantly expands the search space, enabling more flexible and efficient exploration of LLM vulnerabilities. Extensive evaluations show that UJA achieves over 80\% attack success rates against recent safety-aligned LLMs with only 100 optimization iterations, outperforming the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks by over 30\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02999
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Untargeted Jailbreak Attack
Huang, Xinzhe
Hu, Wenjing
Zheng, Tianhang
Xiu, Kedong
Jia, Xiaojun
Wang, Di
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses. However, restricting the objective as inducing fixed targets inherently constrains the adversarial search space, limiting the overall attack efficacy. Furthermore, existing methods typically require numerous optimization iterations to fulfill the large gap between the fixed target and the original LLM output, resulting in low attack efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first gradient-based untargeted jailbreak attack (UJA), which relies on an untargeted objective to maximize the unsafety probability of the LLM output, without enforcing any response patterns. For tractable optimization, we further decompose this objective into two differentiable sub-objectives to search the optimal harmful response and the corresponding adversarial prompt, with a theoretical analysis to validate the decomposition. In contrast to existing attacks, UJA's unrestricted objective significantly expands the search space, enabling more flexible and efficient exploration of LLM vulnerabilities. Extensive evaluations show that UJA achieves over 80\% attack success rates against recent safety-aligned LLMs with only 100 optimization iterations, outperforming the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks by over 30\%.
title Untargeted Jailbreak Attack
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02999