MetaCipher: A General and Extensible Reinforcement Learning Framework for Obfuscation-Based Jailbreak Attacks on Black-Box LLMs

Abstract: The growing capabilities of LLMs have exposed them to increasingly sophisticated jailbreak attacks. Among these, obfuscation-based attacks -- which encrypt malicious content to evade detection -- remain highly effective. By leveraging the reasoning ability of advanced LLMs to interpret encrypted prompts, such attacks circumvent conventional defenses that rely on keyword detection or context filtering. These methods are very difficult to defend against, as existing safety mechanisms are not designed to interpret or decode ciphered content. In this work, we propose \textbf{MetaCipher}, a novel obfuscation-based jailbreak framework, along with a reinforcement learning-based dynamic cipher selection mechanism that adaptively chooses optimal encryption strategies from a cipher pool. This approach enhances jailbreak effectiveness and generalizability across diverse task types, victim LLMs, and safety guardrails. Our framework is modular and extensible by design, supporting arbitrary cipher families and accommodating evolving adversarial strategies. We complement our method with a large-scale empirical analysis of cipher performance across multiple victim LLMs. Within as few as 10 queries, MetaCipher achieves over 92\% attack success rate (ASR) on most recent standard malicious prompt benchmarks against state-of-the-art non-reasoning LLMs, and over 74\% ASR against reasoning-capable LLMs, outperforming all existing obfuscation-based jailbreak methods. These results highlight the long-term robustness and adaptability of our approach, making it more resilient than prior methods in the face of advancing safety measures.