Odysseus: Jailbreaking Commercial Multimodal LLM-integrated Systems via Dual Steganography

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Songze, Cheng, Jiameng, Li, Yiming, Jia, Xiaojun, Tao, Dacheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Li, Songze
Cheng, Jiameng
Li, Yiming
Jia, Xiaojun
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Li, Songze
Cheng, Jiameng
Li, Yiming
Jia, Xiaojun
Tao, Dacheng
contents By integrating language understanding with perceptual modalities such as images, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) constitute a critical substrate for modern AI systems, particularly intelligent agents operating in open and interactive environments. However, their increasing accessibility also raises heightened risks of misuse, such as generating harmful or unsafe content. To mitigate these risks, alignment techniques are commonly applied to align model behavior with human values. Despite these efforts, recent studies have shown that jailbreak attacks can circumvent alignment and elicit unsafe outputs. Currently, most existing jailbreak methods are tailored for open-source models and exhibit limited effectiveness against commercial MLLM-integrated systems, which often employ additional filters. These filters can detect and prevent malicious input and output content, significantly reducing jailbreak threats. In this paper, we reveal that the success of these safety filters heavily relies on a critical assumption that malicious content must be explicitly visible in either the input or the output. This assumption, while often valid for traditional LLM-integrated systems, breaks down in MLLM-integrated systems, where attackers can leverage multiple modalities to conceal adversarial intent, leading to a false sense of security in existing MLLM-integrated systems. To challenge this assumption, we propose Odysseus, a novel jailbreak paradigm that introduces dual steganography to covertly embed malicious queries and responses into benign-looking images. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Odysseus successfully jailbreaks several pioneering and realistic MLLM-integrated systems, achieving up to 99% attack success rate. It exposes a fundamental blind spot in existing defenses, and calls for rethinking cross-modal security in MLLM-integrated systems.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20168
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Odysseus: Jailbreaking Commercial Multimodal LLM-integrated Systems via Dual Steganography
Li, Songze
Cheng, Jiameng
Li, Yiming
Jia, Xiaojun
Tao, Dacheng
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
By integrating language understanding with perceptual modalities such as images, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) constitute a critical substrate for modern AI systems, particularly intelligent agents operating in open and interactive environments. However, their increasing accessibility also raises heightened risks of misuse, such as generating harmful or unsafe content. To mitigate these risks, alignment techniques are commonly applied to align model behavior with human values. Despite these efforts, recent studies have shown that jailbreak attacks can circumvent alignment and elicit unsafe outputs. Currently, most existing jailbreak methods are tailored for open-source models and exhibit limited effectiveness against commercial MLLM-integrated systems, which often employ additional filters. These filters can detect and prevent malicious input and output content, significantly reducing jailbreak threats. In this paper, we reveal that the success of these safety filters heavily relies on a critical assumption that malicious content must be explicitly visible in either the input or the output. This assumption, while often valid for traditional LLM-integrated systems, breaks down in MLLM-integrated systems, where attackers can leverage multiple modalities to conceal adversarial intent, leading to a false sense of security in existing MLLM-integrated systems. To challenge this assumption, we propose Odysseus, a novel jailbreak paradigm that introduces dual steganography to covertly embed malicious queries and responses into benign-looking images. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Odysseus successfully jailbreaks several pioneering and realistic MLLM-integrated systems, achieving up to 99% attack success rate. It exposes a fundamental blind spot in existing defenses, and calls for rethinking cross-modal security in MLLM-integrated systems.
title Odysseus: Jailbreaking Commercial Multimodal LLM-integrated Systems via Dual Steganography
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20168