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A Simple and Efficient Jailbreak Method Exploiting LLMs' Helpfulness

Authors: Xuan Luo, Yue Wang, Zefeng He, Geng Tu, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu

Published: 2025-09-17

arXiv ID: 2509.14297v1

Added to Library: 2025-09-19 04:02 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Safety alignment aims to prevent Large Language Models (LLMs) from responding to harmful queries. To strengthen safety protections, jailbreak methods are developed to simulate malicious attacks and uncover vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce HILL (Hiding Intention by Learning from LLMs), a novel jailbreak approach that systematically transforms imperative harmful requests into learning-style questions with only straightforward hypotheticality indicators. Further, we introduce two new metrics to thoroughly evaluate the utility of jailbreak methods. Experiments on the AdvBench dataset across a wide range of models demonstrate HILL's strong effectiveness, generalizability, and harmfulness. It achieves top attack success rates on the majority of models and across malicious categories while maintaining high efficiency with concise prompts. Results of various defense methods show the robustness of HILL, with most defenses having mediocre effects or even increasing the attack success rates. Moreover, the assessment on our constructed safe prompts reveals inherent limitations of LLMs' safety mechanisms and flaws in defense methods. This work exposes significant vulnerabilities of safety measures against learning-style elicitation, highlighting a critical challenge of balancing helpfulness and safety alignments.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of HILL (Hiding Intention by Learning from LLMs), a new jailbreak method for Large Language Models that transforms harmful requests into learning-style questions.
  • Demonstration of HILL's high attack success rates across 22 different models, proving its effectiveness and generalizability across various malicious categories.
  • Development of two new metrics for evaluating jailbreak methods, focusing on Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Efficiency, exposing the shortcomings of existing safety defenses.
  • Analysis of various defense mechanisms against HILL, revealing their limited effectiveness and significant vulnerabilities in current LLM safety measures.
  • Identification of the challenges in balancing helpfulness and safety in AI systems, highlighting the trade-offs in LLM design.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is a significant contribution to the understanding of vulnerabilities in Large Language Models. The proposed HILL jailbreak method demonstrates not only a novel approach to eliciting unsafe content from models but also underscores the critical deficiencies in existing safety mechanisms. The findings emphasize the urgent need to enhance the robustness of AI systems to prevent exploitation by malicious users, making this research a vital addition to AI safety discourse.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers will find this paper compelling as it thoroughly investigates the weaknesses in safety alignment mechanisms of LLMs. Given the growing deployment of AI in sensitive applications, understanding and combating vulnerabilities like those exploited by HILL is essential for developing more secure AI systems. This research not only advances the knowledge of jailbreak tactics but also invites further exploration of effective defense strategies against such sophisticated methods.

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