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Gpt- 4 is too smart to be safe: Stealthy chat with llms via cipher

26 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

26 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Safety lies at the core of the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). There is ample work on aligning LLMs with human ethics and preferences, including data filtering in pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and red teaming, etc. In this study, we discover that chat in cipher can bypass the safety alignment techniques of LLMs, which are mainly conducted in natural languages. We propose a novel framework CipherChat to systematically examine the generalizability of safety alignment to non-natural languages -- ciphers. CipherChat enables humans to chat with LLMs through cipher prompts topped with system role descriptions and few-shot enciphered demonstrations. We use CipherChat to assess state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 for different representative human ciphers across 11 safety domains in both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that certain ciphers succeed almost 100% of the time to bypass the safety alignment of GPT-4 in several safety domains, demonstrating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-natural languages. Notably, we identify that LLMs seem to have a ''secret cipher'', and propose a novel SelfCipher that uses only role play and several demonstrations in natural language to evoke this capability. SelfCipher surprisingly outperforms existing human ciphers in almost all cases. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/RobustNLP/CipherChat.

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representative citing papers

Attention Is Where You Attack

cs.CR · 2026-04-30 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ARA jailbreaks safety-aligned LLMs like LLaMA-3 and Mistral by redirecting attention in safety-heavy heads with as few as 5 tokens, achieving 30-36% attack success while ablating the same heads barely affects refusals.

A Systematic Investigation of RL-Jailbreaking in LLMs

cs.LG · 2026-05-07 · reject · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

An ablation study of an RL-based jailbreaker finds the attack succeeds across tested open-weight models and safeguards, but its headline conclusion about dense rewards and long episodes is contradicted by its own data.

Exploring the Secondary Risks of Large Language Models

cs.LG · 2025-06-14 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Introduces secondary risks as a new class of LLM failures from benign prompts, defines two primitives, proposes SecLens search framework, and releases SecRiskBench showing risks are widespread across 16 models.

Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4

cs.CL · 2023-10-03 · conditional · novelty 6.0

Translating unsafe inputs to low-resource languages jailbreaks GPT-4 at rates on par with or exceeding state-of-the-art attacks.

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Showing 26 of 26 citing papers.