arXiv subjects

Churui Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Churui Zeng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TRACE: Task-Aware Adaptive Self-Evolving Agentic Jailbreaking

The rise of LLM agents introduces a new threat by enabling planning, coding, and even end-to-end execution of expert-level attack workflows. However, this threat remains underexplored and underestimated since (i) safety alignment prevents LLMs from directly generating harmful instructions, and (ii) most existing jailbreak methods cannot consistently induce agents to execute malicious operations. In this paper, we propose TRACE, a practical agentic jailbreaking framework to further reveal the risks of this threat surface. To conceal the malicious intent, TRACE decomposes a malicious task into multiple subtask sequences under different schemes and selects the sequence with the fewest explicitly harmful subtasks. TRACE then disguises the remaining harmful subtasks as benign-looking instructions by embedding them in task-aware scenarios with related roles, environments, directives, and heuristics. The scenarios are iteratively evolved through well-defined transformation actions, which are sampled by a Q-learning-inspired mechanism, for inducing the agent to execute on the harmful subtasks. Extensive evaluations on AgentHarm and AdvCUA show that TRACE consistently outperforms existing jailbreak baselines across multiple advanced LLM agents, achieving up to 100% bypass rate and 0.73 average success score. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of TRACE in controlled cyberattack instances. Our code and demos are available at https://github.com/ZJU-LLM-Safety/TRACE.git.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Dynamic Jailbreaking Attack

Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks typically optimize a fixed-length adversarial suffix toward a predefined target response with a static optimization strategy. However, this fully static formulation undermines the effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of gradient-based jailbreaking because (i) A predefined target usually lies in the low-probability region of a safety-aligned LLM's conditional output distribution, forcing the optimization to pursue an unlikely response pattern; (ii) Simple affirmative targets may even mislead LLMs to generate affirmative responses that are not highly relevant to the prompts; (iii) Fixed optimization strategy and suffix length treat all prompts equally, leading to limited attack capability for hard prompts and redundant capacity for easy ones. To address these limitations, we propose Dynamic Jailbreaking Attack (DJA), a parameter-free gradient-based jailbreak framework using dynamic candidate exploration, dynamic relevant targets and dynamic optimization strategy to craft adversarial prompts. In each optimization round, DJA samples multiple candidate target responses directly from the LLM's distribution conditioned on the current adversarial prompt. Among these candidates, DJA employs a multi-objective scorer to select an optimal target that satisfies multi-dimensional criteria such as harmfulness, relevance, and usefulness. Moreover, DJA introduces a parameter-free dynamic optimization strategy that allocates adversarial effort based on real-time feedback, adapting suffix length, candidate sampling capacity, and optimization iterations according to the difficulty of each harmful prompt. In an extensive evaluation of 40 safety-aligned LLMs (12 model families, scaling from 0.5B to 32B), DJA achieves a 100% ASR across all LLMs, requiring only 13.68 optimization rounds on average (10 iterations per round).

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

DualBreach: Efficient Dual-Jailbreaking via Target-Driven Initialization and Multi-Target Optimization

Recent research has focused on exploring the vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to elicit harmful and/or sensitive content from LLMs. However, due to the insufficient research on dual-jailbreaking -- attacks targeting both LLMs and Guardrails, the effectiveness of existing attacks is limited when attempting to bypass safety-aligned LLMs shielded by guardrails. Therefore, in this paper, we propose DualBreach, a target-driven framework for dual-jailbreaking. DualBreach employs a Target-driven Initialization (TDI) strategy to dynamically construct initial prompts, combined with a Multi-Target Optimization (MTO) method that utilizes approximate gradients to jointly adapt the prompts across guardrails and LLMs, which can simultaneously save the number of queries and achieve a high dual-jailbreaking success rate. For black-box guardrails, DualBreach either employs a powerful open-sourced guardrail or imitates the target black-box guardrail by training a proxy model, to incorporate guardrails into the MTO process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DualBreach in dual-jailbreaking scenarios through extensive evaluation on several widely-used datasets. Experimental results indicate that DualBreach outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer queries, achieving significantly higher success rates across all settings. More specifically, DualBreach achieves an average dual-jailbreaking success rate of 93.67% against GPT-4 with Llama-Guard-3 protection, whereas the best success rate achieved by other methods is 88.33%. Moreover, DualBreach only uses an average of 1.77 queries per successful dual-jailbreak, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. For the purpose of defense, we propose an XGBoost-based ensemble defensive mechanism named EGuard, which integrates the strengths of multiple guardrails, demonstrating superior performance compared with Llama-Guard-3.

cs.CR↗