Jailbreaking GPT-4V via Self-Adversarial Attacks with System Prompts

Existing work on jailbreak Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has focused primarily on adversarial examples in model inputs, with less attention to vulnerabilities in model APIs. To fill the research gap, we carry out the following work: 1) We discover a system prompt leakage vulnerability in GPT-4V. Through carefully designed dialogue, we successfully steal the internal system prompts of GPT-4V. This finding indicates potential exploitable security risks in MLLMs; 2)Based on the acquired system prompts, we propose a novel MLLM jailbreaking attack method termed SASP (Self-Adversarial Attack via System Prompt). By employing GPT-4 as a red teaming tool against itself, we aim to search for potential jailbreak prompts leveraging stolen system prompts. Furthermore, in pursuit of better performance, we also add human modification based on GPT-4's analysis, which further improves the attack success rate to 98.7\%; 3) We evaluated the effect of modifying system prompts to defend against jailbreaking attacks. Results show that appropriately designed system prompts can significantly reduce jailbreak success rates. Overall, our work provides new insights into enhancing MLLM security, demonstrating the important role of system prompts in jailbreaking, which could be leveraged to greatly facilitate jailbreak success rates while also holding the potential for defending against jailbreaks.