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Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots

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arxiv 2410.13691 v2 pith:AAKA5CGV submitted 2024-10-17 cs.RO cs.AI

Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots

classification cs.RO cs.AI
keywords llmsroboticsrobopairrobotswhereinaccessattackerfirst
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The recent introduction of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of robotics by enabling contextual reasoning and intuitive human-robot interaction in domains as varied as manipulation, locomotion, and self-driving vehicles. When viewed as a stand-alone technology, LLMs are known to be vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, wherein malicious prompters elicit harmful text by bypassing LLM safety guardrails. To assess the risks of deploying LLMs in robotics, in this paper, we introduce RoboPAIR, the first algorithm designed to jailbreak LLM-controlled robots. Unlike existing, textual attacks on LLM chatbots, RoboPAIR elicits harmful physical actions from LLM-controlled robots, a phenomenon we experimentally demonstrate in three scenarios: (i) a white-box setting, wherein the attacker has full access to the NVIDIA Dolphins self-driving LLM, (ii) a gray-box setting, wherein the attacker has partial access to a Clearpath Robotics Jackal UGV robot equipped with a GPT-4o planner, and (iii) a black-box setting, wherein the attacker has only query access to the GPT-3.5-integrated Unitree Robotics Go2 robot dog. In each scenario and across three new datasets of harmful robotic actions, we demonstrate that RoboPAIR, as well as several static baselines, finds jailbreaks quickly and effectively, often achieving 100% attack success rates. Our results reveal, for the first time, that the risks of jailbroken LLMs extend far beyond text generation, given the distinct possibility that jailbroken robots could cause physical damage in the real world. Indeed, our results on the Unitree Go2 represent the first successful jailbreak of a deployed commercial robotic system. Addressing this emerging vulnerability is critical for ensuring the safe deployment of LLMs in robotics. Additional media is available at: https://robopair.org

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    A unified threat model for LLM-enabled robots reveals three cross-boundary attack chains from user input to unsafe physical actuation due to missing validations and unmediated crossings.

  3. RIPA: Sensory-Vector Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Controlled ROS 2 Robots

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    Empirical study finds LLM robustness to sensory prompt injections in robotic systems is model-specific rather than scale-dependent, with a hybrid firewall blocking known patterns but bypassed by obfuscated variants at...

  4. Comprehensive AI governance requires addressing non-model gains

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