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TrapSuffix: Proactive Defense Against Adversarial Suffixes in Jailbreaking

Authors: Mengyao Du, Han Fang, Haokai Ma, Gang Yang, Quanjun Yin, Shouling Ji, Ee-Chien Chang

Published: 2026-02-06

arXiv ID: 2602.06630v1

Added to Library: 2026-02-09 03:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Suffix-based jailbreak attacks append an adversarial suffix, i.e., a short token sequence, to steer aligned LLMs into unsafe outputs. Since suffixes are free-form text, they admit endlessly many surface forms, making jailbreak mitigation difficult. Most existing defenses depend on passive detection of suspicious suffixes, without leveraging the defender's inherent asymmetric ability to inject secrets and proactively conceal gaps. Motivated by this, we take a controllability-oriented perspective and develop a proactive defense that nudges attackers into a no-win dilemma: either they fall into defender-designed optimization traps and fail to produce an effective adversarial suffix, or they can succeed only by generating adversarial suffixes that carry distinctive, traceable fingerprints. We propose TrapSuffix, a lightweight fine-tuning approach that injects trap-aligned behaviors into the base model without changing the inference pipeline. TrapSuffix channels jailbreak attempts into these two outcomes by reshaping the model's response landscape to adversarial suffixes. Across diverse suffix-based jailbreak settings, TrapSuffix reduces the average attack success rate to below 0.01 percent and achieves an average tracing success rate of 87.9 percent, providing both strong defense and reliable traceability. It introduces no inference-time overhead and incurs negligible memory cost, requiring only 15.87 MB of additional memory on average, whereas state-of-the-art LLM-based detection defenses typically incur memory overheads at the 1e4 MB level, while composing naturally with existing filtering-based defenses for complementary protection.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of TrapSuffix, a proactive defense mechanism against suffix-based jailbreaking that reshapes the adversarial optimization landscape by creating deceptive local minima and traceable fingerprints.
  • Demonstration of TrapSuffix's effectiveness, achieving an attack success rate (ASR) below 0.01% across various jailbreak settings while maintaining a high tracing success rate (TSR) of 87.9%.
  • Utilization of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for implementing the defense, which incurs negligible memory cost (average of 15.87 MB) and ensures no inference-time overhead, making it efficient for practical applications.
  • A comprehensive evaluation across multiple models and diverse attack strategies, proving TrapSuffix's robustness against adaptive attackers with knowledge of trap suffixes and demonstrating its ability to preserve model utility for general tasks.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is a significant contribution to the field of AI security, particularly in safeguarding large language models against adversarial manipulation. By presenting the TrapSuffix approach, which not only mitigates the threat of jailbreaks but also maintains the integrity and utility of the underlying models, the authors advance the conversation on proactive defense strategies in AI systems. The blend of efficiency and effectiveness illustrated in their results reflects a promising direction for future research and application in defensive AI technology.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers will find this paper particularly intriguing due to its exploration of proactive defense mechanisms in AI systems. By focusing on suffix-based jailbreak attacks, which pose a growing threat to the safety of language models, the paper highlights a novel approach that reshapes the optimization landscape to deter adversarial behavior. The proposed TrapSuffix method not only offers insights into mitigating these risks but also emphasizes the importance of traceability and robust defense strategies, making it a valuable reference for developing resilient AI systems.

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