Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Is the System Message Really Important to Jailbreaks in Large Language Models?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2402.14857 v2 pith:SNTBQGYE submitted 2024-02-20 cs.CL cs.AIcs.CR

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.CR
keywords systemllmsmessagesjailbreaksjailbreakmessagepromptsdifferent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has rendered them indispensable in modern society. While security measures are typically to align LLMs with human values prior to release, recent studies have unveiled a concerning phenomenon named "Jailbreak". This term refers to the unexpected and potentially harmful responses generated by LLMs when prompted with malicious questions. Most existing research focus on generating jailbreak prompts but system message configurations vary significantly in experiments. In this paper, we aim to answer a question: Is the system message really important for jailbreaks in LLMs? We conduct experiments in mainstream LLMs to generate jailbreak prompts with varying system messages: short, long, and none. We discover that different system messages have distinct resistances to jailbreaks. Therefore, we explore the transferability of jailbreaks across LLMs with different system messages. Furthermore, we propose the System Messages Evolutionary Algorithm (SMEA) to generate system messages that are more resistant to jailbreak prompts, even with minor changes. Through SMEA, we get a robust system messages population with little change in the length of system messages. Our research not only bolsters LLMs security but also raises the bar for jailbreaks, fostering advancements in this field of study.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. Security--Fidelity Tradeoffs: The Hidden Cost of Prompt Injection Defense

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Prompt injection defenses create a security-fidelity tradeoff with no model or defense achieving both high security and high fidelity on the SecFid benchmark across 1,168 examples.

  2. Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Introduces MM-Privacy dataset and evaluations showing MLLMs leak sensitive data from images in various tasks, highlighting task inconsistency effects.

  3. SoK: Systematizing LLM Prompt Security: Taxonomies, Datasets, and Unified Evaluation of Attacks and Defenses

    cs.CR 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A systemization of LLM jailbreak security that adds linked taxonomies, an evaluation platform, and JailbreakDB, while its main attack–defense comparison results remain deferred.

  4. ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments

    cs.CL 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    ReasoningGuard is an inference-time method that uses attention mechanisms to inject safety aha moments and scaling sampling to defend large reasoning models against jailbreak attacks.

  5. SafeLLM: Unlearning Harmful Outputs from Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks

    cs.LG 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    SafeLLM detects unsafe outputs, traces them to specific feedforward-network components, and applies constrained optimization to unlearn harmful generation while preserving general capability.

  6. Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey

    cs.CR 2024-07 accept novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey that creates taxonomies for jailbreak attacks and defenses on LLMs, subdivides them into sub-classes, and compares evaluation approaches.

  7. Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety

    cs.CR 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A comprehensive survey that taxonomizes safety threats to large models and agents, reviews defenses and benchmarks, and outlines open challenges.

Pith tools