Chain-of-Lure: A Synthetic Narrative-Driven Approach to Compromise Large Language Models

Abstract: In the era of rapid generative AI development, interactions between humans and LLMs face significant misusing risks. Previous research has primarily focused on black-box scenarios using human-guided prompts and white-box scenarios leveraging gradient-based LLM generation methods, neglecting the possibility that LLMs can act not only as victim models, but also as attacker models to harm other models. We proposes a novel jailbreaking method inspired by the Chain-of-Thought mechanism, where the attacker model uses mission transfer to conceal harmful user intent in dialogue and generates chained narrative lures to stimulate the reasoning capabilities of victim models, leading to successful jailbreaking. To enhance the attack success rate, we introduce a helper model that performs random narrative optimization on the narrative lures during multi-turn dialogues while ensuring alignment with the original intent, enabling the optimized lures to bypass the safety barriers of victim models effectively. Our experiments reveal that models with weaker safety mechanisms exhibit stronger attack capabilities, demonstrating that models can not only be exploited, but also help harm others. By incorporating toxicity scores, we employ third-party models to evaluate the harmfulness of victim models' responses to jailbreaking attempts. The study shows that using refusal keywords as an evaluation metric for attack success rates is significantly flawed because it does not assess whether the responses guide harmful questions, while toxicity scores measure the harm of generated content with more precision and its alignment with harmful questions. Our approach demonstrates outstanding performance, uncovering latent vulnerabilities in LLMs and providing data-driven feedback to optimize LLM safety mechanisms. We also discuss two defensive strategies to offer guidance on improving defense mechanisms.