InfoFlood: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Information Overload
Authors: Advait Yadav, Haibo Jin, Man Luo, Jun Zhuang, Haohan Wang
AI-generated Key Points
- Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks
- A novel technique called Information Overload exploits excessive linguistic complexity within queries to disrupt safety mechanisms directly
- InfoFlood is a sophisticated jailbreak attack that transforms malicious queries into complex prompts, outperforming baseline attacks on popular LLMs like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0
- Existing post-processing defenses have limitations in mitigating Information Overload-based attacks
- The study emphasizes the importance of robust defenses against advanced jailbreak strategies like InfoFlood in the evolving landscape of AI security
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains. However, their potential to generate harmful responses has raised significant societal and regulatory concerns, especially when manipulated by adversarial techniques known as "jailbreak" attacks. Existing jailbreak methods typically involve appending carefully crafted prefixes or suffixes to malicious prompts in order to bypass the built-in safety mechanisms of these models. In this work, we identify a new vulnerability in which excessive linguistic complexity can disrupt built-in safety mechanisms-without the need for any added prefixes or suffixes-allowing attackers to elicit harmful outputs directly. We refer to this phenomenon as Information Overload. To automatically exploit this vulnerability, we propose InfoFlood, a jailbreak attack that transforms malicious queries into complex, information-overloaded queries capable of bypassing built-in safety mechanisms. Specifically, InfoFlood: (1) uses linguistic transformations to rephrase malicious queries, (2) identifies the root cause of failure when an attempt is unsuccessful, and (3) refines the prompt's linguistic structure to address the failure while preserving its malicious intent. We empirically validate the effectiveness of InfoFlood on four widely used LLMs-GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo, Gemini 2.0, and LLaMA 3.1-by measuring their jailbreak success rates. InfoFlood consistently outperforms baseline attacks, achieving up to 3 times higher success rates across multiple jailbreak benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that commonly adopted post-processing defenses, including OpenAI's Moderation API, Perspective API, and SmoothLLM, fail to mitigate these attacks. This highlights a critical weakness in traditional AI safety guardrails when confronted with information overload-based jailbreaks.
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