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Evaluating Adversarial Vulnerabilities in Modern Large Language Models

Authors: Tom Perel

Published: 2025-11-21

arXiv ID: 2511.17666v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-25 03:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

The recent boom and rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into a wide range of applications warrants a deeper understanding of their security and safety vulnerabilities. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the susceptibility to jailbreak attacks for two leading publicly available LLMs, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash and OpenAI's GPT-4 (specifically the GPT-4o mini model accessible in the free tier). The research utilized two main bypass strategies: 'self-bypass', where models were prompted to circumvent their own safety protocols, and 'cross-bypass', where one model generated adversarial prompts to exploit vulnerabilities in the other. Four attack methods were employed - direct injection, role-playing, context manipulation, and obfuscation - to generate five distinct categories of unsafe content: hate speech, illegal activities, malicious code, dangerous content, and misinformation. The success of the attack was determined by the generation of disallowed content, with successful jailbreaks assigned a severity score. The findings indicate a disparity in jailbreak susceptibility between 2.5 Flash and GPT-4, suggesting variations in their safety implementations or architectural design. Cross-bypass attacks were particularly effective, indicating that an ample amount of vulnerabilities exist in the underlying transformer architecture. This research contributes a scalable framework for automated AI red-teaming and provides data-driven insights into the current state of LLM safety, underscoring the complex challenge of balancing model capabilities with robust safety mechanisms.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper presents a comparative analysis of jailbreak vulnerabilities in two popular LLMs, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini, revealing different susceptibilities to automated adversarial attacks.
  • Four attack vectors (Direct Injection, Role-Playing, Context Manipulation, Obfuscation) were used, with Context Manipulation identified as the most potent, demonstrating a significant challenge in LLM safety mechanisms.
  • The study introduces two bypass strategies, 'self-bypass' and 'cross-bypass', allowing LLMs to generate adversarial prompts against themselves and each other, offering a scalable framework for automated testing.
  • Findings indicate that Gemini is generally more resilient than GPT-4 against jailbreak attacks, highlighting variations in safety implementations across LLM architectures.
  • The research validates the effectiveness of using LLMs for red-teaming under the self-bypass method, suggesting cost-effective and efficient ways to improve AI safety by enabling models to identify and expose their own vulnerabilities.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is crucial in the ongoing exploration of safety vulnerabilities in large language models, emphasizing the need for robust defenses against adversarial attacks. By systematically comparing two prominent models, the study sheds light on their differing safety architectures and introduces novel methods for evaluating their resilience, thus contributing valuable insights to the field of AI security.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers will find this paper of great interest as it addresses pressing concerns regarding the safety and ethical implications of LLMs. The innovative methodologies and empirical findings not only enhance the understanding of adversarial vulnerabilities but also propose forward-thinking strategies for improving LLM safety protocols in real-world applications.

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