← Back to Library

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Search

Authors: Rongzhe Wei, Peizhi Niu, Xinjie Shen, Tony Tu, Yifan Li, Ruihan Wu, Eli Chien, Olgica Milenkovic, Pan Li

Published: 2025-12-01

arXiv ID: 2512.01353v1

Added to Library: 2025-12-02 04:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails to elicit harmful outputs. Existing approaches overwhelmingly operate within the prompt-optimization paradigm: whether through traditional algorithmic search or recent agent-based workflows, the resulting prompts typically retain malicious semantic signals that modern guardrails are primed to detect. In contrast, we identify a deeper, largely overlooked vulnerability stemming from the highly interconnected nature of an LLM's internal knowledge. This structure allows harmful objectives to be realized by weaving together sequences of benign sub-queries, each of which individually evades detection. To exploit this loophole, we introduce the Correlated Knowledge Attack Agent (CKA-Agent), a dynamic framework that reframes jailbreaking as an adaptive, tree-structured exploration of the target model's knowledge base. The CKA-Agent issues locally innocuous queries, uses model responses to guide exploration across multiple paths, and ultimately assembles the aggregated information to achieve the original harmful objective. Evaluated across state-of-the-art commercial LLMs (Gemini2.5-Flash/Pro, GPT-oss-120B, Claude-Haiku-4.5), CKA-Agent consistently achieves over 95% success rates even against strong guardrails, underscoring the severity of this vulnerability and the urgent need for defenses against such knowledge-decomposition attacks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/CKA-Agent.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of the Correlated Knowledge Attack Agent (CKA-Agent), a novel framework that utilizes a tree-structured exploration of an LLM's internal knowledge to bypass security defenses.
  • CKA-Agent employs harmless prompt weaving, issuing locally benign sub-queries to build harmful narratives through adaptive exploration without raising detection flags.
  • Empirical results demonstrate that CKA-Agent outperforms existing methods, achieving over 95% success rates across various advanced LLMs, indicating a significant vulnerability in current guardrail systems.
  • The paper provides a unified taxonomy of existing jailbreak methodologies, highlighting their limitations compared to the adaptive, dynamic approach of CKA-Agent.
  • Analysis of defenses shows they predominantly fail against decomposition attacks, underscoring the need for improved multi-turn intent detection mechanisms.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is crucial as it unveils a critical vulnerability in LLMs, demonstrating how advanced models can be manipulated through innocuous queries that collectively achieve harmful goals. The findings emphasize the need for developing more robust and intelligent guardrails in AI systems, addressing the shortcomings of existing defenses.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers would find this paper important as it highlights a new class of security threats generated through nuanced prompt engineering. The detailed exploration and testing across various models provide insight into existing vulnerabilities, guiding future defensive strategies and research in AI alignment and safety.

📚 Read the Full Paper