SoK: Systematizing LLM Prompt Security: Taxonomies, Datasets, and Unified Evaluation of Attacks and Defenses
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
Prompt-security claims for large language models (LLMs) are often compared as properties of individual attacks or defenses, although measured harmfulness depends on the target model, access setting, attack and defense configuration, prompt sample, and judger. We systematize 272 studies through three linked, multi-label taxonomies of jailbreak attacks, defenses, and model vulnerabilities. To make these dependencies explicit, we introduce an access-compatible evaluation protocol over configured langle M,A,D,S,Jrangle tuples and instantiate it in PromptSecurity, an open-source platform that records method settings, outputs, judgments, and query costs. We release two complementary datasets: JailbreakDB, with 445,752 jailbreak system-user prompt pairs and 1,094,122 benign prompts, and PromptSecurity-Eval, with 166,200 harmful-query and 9,200 benign-utility output records. We evaluate 11 target models, 20 attacks, nine defenses, and three automated judgers under a matched, single-turn protocol using 100 harmful queries and separate benign-utility tasks. Lower attack success can reflect failure to execute transformed requests rather than stronger safety; attack-category advantages can reverse when one method is excluded, and attack success varies with assistant choice. Defenses can reduce harmful outputs while degrading benign-task utility or causing backfire. Rejudging identical outputs also shows that measured attack success is sensitive to the behavior supplied to the judger, highlighting the need to report judger configurations alongside ASR. These findings motivate configuration-aware reporting rather than context-free method rankings. Leaderboard: https://datasec-lab.github.io/PromptSecurityLeaderboard/. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/youbin2014/JailbreakDB. GitHub: https://github.com/datasec-lab/PromptSecurity.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 176 of its 224 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.
Builds on
176 of 224 references.
Closest ancestors · 103
Same direction, newest first
- 2025MetaDefense: Defending Finetuning-based Jailbreak Attack Before and During Generation9 Oct
- 2025Harmful Prompt Laundering: Jailbreaking LLMs with Abductive Styles and Symbolic Encoding13 Sep
- 2025Response Attack: Exploiting Contextual Priming to Jailbreak Large Language Models7 Jul
- 2025From LLMs to MLLMs to Agents: A Survey of Emerging Paradigms in Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses within LLM Ecosystem18 Jun
- 2025SoK: Evaluating Jailbreak Guardrails for Large Language Models12 Jun
- 2025TwinBreak: Jailbreaking LLM Security Alignments based on Twin Prompts9 Jun
- 2025SafeDialBench: A Fine-Grained Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues with Diverse Jailbreak Attacks16 Feb
- 2025JBShield: Defending Large Language Models from Jailbreak Attacks through Activated Concept Analysis and Manipulation11 Feb
- 2024BlackDAN: A Black-Box Multi-Objective Approach for Effective and Contextual Jailbreaking of Large Language Models13 Oct
- 2024JAILJUDGE: A Comprehensive Jailbreak Judge Benchmark with Multi-Agent Enhanced Explanation Evaluation Framework11 Oct
- 2024RePD: Defending Jailbreak Attack through a Retrieval-based Prompt Decomposition Process11 Oct
- 2024Root Defence Strategies: Ensuring Safety of LLM at the Decoding Level9 Oct
38 more
- 2024Functional Homotopy: Smoothing Discrete Optimization via Continuous Parameters for LLM Jailbreak Attacks5 Oct
- 2024Harnessing Task Overload for Scalable Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models5 Oct
- 2024AutoDAN-Turbo: A Lifelong Agent for Strategy Self-Exploration to Jailbreak LLMs3 Oct
- 2024FlipAttack: Jailbreak LLMs via Flipping2 Oct
- 2024MoJE: Mixture of Jailbreak Experts, Naive Tabular Classifiers as Guard for Prompt Attacks26 Sep
- 2024PathSeeker: Exploring LLM Security Vulnerabilities with a Reinforcement Learning-Based Jailbreak Approach21 Sep
- 2024AdaPPA: Adaptive Position Pre-Fill Jailbreak Attack Approach Targeting LLMs11 Sep
- 2024HSF: Defending against Jailbreak Attacks with Hidden State Filtering31 Aug
- 2024LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yet27 Aug
- 2024Advancing Adversarial Suffix Transfer Learning on Aligned Large Language Models27 Aug
- 2024Probing the Safety Response Boundary of Large Language Models via Unsafe Decoding Path Generation20 Aug
- 2024Prefix Guidance: A Steering Wheel for Large Language Models to Defend Against Jailbreak Attacks15 Aug
- 2024A Jailbroken GenAI Model Can Cause Substantial Harm: GenAI-powered Applications are Vulnerable to PromptWares9 Aug
- 2024Reasoning as a Weapon: Adaptive Dual-Path Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models23 Jul
- 2024Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey5 Jul
- 2024Badllama 3: removing safety finetuning from Llama 3 in minutes1 Jul
- 2024Large Language Models Are Involuntary Truth-Tellers: Exploiting Fallacy Failure for Jailbreak Attacks1 Jul
- 2024Virtual Context: Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks with Special Token Injection28 Jun
- 2024JailbreakZoo: Survey, Landscapes, and Horizons in Jailbreaking Large Language and Vision-Language Models26 Jun
- 2024Poisoned LangChain: Jailbreak LLMs by LangChain26 Jun
- 2024Bag of Tricks: Benchmarking of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs13 Jun
- 2024JailbreakEval: An Integrated Toolkit for Evaluating Jailbreak Attempts Against Large Language Models13 Jun
- 2024RL-JACK: Reinforcement Learning-powered Black-box Jailbreaking Attack against LLMs13 Jun
- 2024When LLM Meets DRL: Advancing Jailbreaking Efficiency via DRL-guided Search13 Jun
- 2024SelfDefend: LLMs Can Defend Themselves against Jailbreaking in a Practical Manner8 Jun
- 2024Adversarial Tuning: Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs7 Jun
- 2024Improved Few-Shot Jailbreaking Can Circumvent Aligned Language Models and Their Defenses3 Jun
- 2024Improved Techniques for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models31 May
- 2024Mind the Inconspicuous: Revealing the Hidden Weakness in Aligned LLMs' Refusal Boundaries31 May
- 2024Improved Generation of Adversarial Examples Against Safety-aligned LLMs28 May
- 2024Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing28 May
- 2024GPT-4 Jailbreaks Itself with Near-Perfect Success Using Self-Explanation21 May
- 2024Don't Say No: Jailbreaking LLM by Suppressing Refusal25 Apr
- 2024Competition Report: Finding Universal Jailbreak Backdoors in Aligned LLMs22 Apr
- 2024AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs21 Apr
- 2024AmpleGCG: Learning a Universal and Transferable Generative Model of Adversarial Suffixes for Jailbreaking Both Open and Closed LLMs11 Apr
- 2024JailBreakV: A Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of MultiModal Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks3 Apr
- 2024Jailbreaking Leading Safety-Aligned LLMs with Simple Adaptive Attacks2 Apr
50 newest of 103 All 103 (JSON)
Other references · 73
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- 2023Instruction Tuning with GPT-4cited by 686
- 2023Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Modelscited by 651
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- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agentscited by 538
- 2024WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMscited by 496
- 2024The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructionscited by 493
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- 2023Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPTcited by 333
- 2024Improving Alignment and Robustness with Circuit Breakerscited by 322
- 2023Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attackscited by 278
- 2024Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlightingcited by 267
- 2021Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks against Text Transformerscited by 234
- 2023Red-Teaming Large Language Models using Chain of Utterances for Safety-Alignmentcited by 223
- 2024ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMscited by 216
- 2023SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Modelscited by 189
- 2024Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Modelscited by 167
- 2023RAIN: Your Language Models Can Align Themselves without Finetuningcited by 157
- 2023Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMscited by 150
- 2023Tensor Trust: Interpretable Prompt Injection Attacks from an Online Gamecited by 145
- 2023From ChatGPT to ThreatGPT: Impact of Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacycited by 143
- 2024Optimization-based Prompt Injection Attack to LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 143
- 2024AEGIS: Online Adaptive AI Content Safety Moderation with Ensemble of LLM Expertscited by 136
- 2024AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Promptingcited by 125
- 2023Evil Geniuses: Delving into the Safety of LLM-based Agentscited by 106
- 2024Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editingcited by 87
- 2024Neural Exec: Learning (and Learning from) Execution Triggers for Prompt Injection Attackscited by 85
- 2024ToolSword: Unveiling Safety Issues of Large Language Models in Tool Learning Across Three Stagescited by 82
- 2024PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safetycited by 80
- 2024Does Refusal Training in LLMs Generalize to the Past Tense?cited by 79
- 2024Chain of Attack: a Semantic-Driven Contextual Multi-Turn attacker for LLMcited by 77
- 2023Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Modelscited by 76
- 2024CodeAttack: Revealing Safety Generalization Challenges of Large Language Models via Code Completioncited by 76
- 2024AIR-Bench 2024: A Safety Benchmark Based on Risk Categories from Regulations and Policiescited by 74
- 2024Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Modelscited by 72
- 2024Visual-RolePlay: Universal Jailbreak Attack on MultiModal Large Language Models via Role-playing Image Charactercited by 68
- 2023Adversarial Demonstration Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 63
- 2024PAL: Proxy-Guided Black-Box Attack on Large Language Modelscited by 50
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- 2024RedAgent: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Context-aware Autonomous Language Agentcited by 44
- 2024Arondight: Red Teaming Large Vision Language Models with Auto-generated Multi-modal Jailbreak Promptscited by 42
- 2024SPML: A DSL for Defending Language Models Against Prompt Attackscited by 34
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50 most cited of 73 All 73 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026The Promptware Kill Chain: How Prompt Injections Gradually Evolved Into a Multistep Malware Delivery Mechanismcited by 9
- 2026JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026One Goal, Many Commands: Characterizing Denylist Fragility in AI Agentscited by 1
- 2026Security and Privacy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Architectures, Threats, Defenses, and Future Directions for Building Trustworthy Systemscited by 0
- 2026The Safeguard Worked. Is the LLM System Safer?cited by 0
- 2026The Safeguard Worked. Is the LLM System Safer?1 Sep 2026
- 2026JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models20 Jul 2026
- 2026Security and Privacy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Architectures, Threats, Defenses, and Future Directions for Building Trustworthy Systems24 Jun 2026
- 2026One Goal, Many Commands: Characterizing Denylist Fragility in AI Agents14 Jun 2026
- 2026The Promptware Kill Chain: How Prompt Injections Gradually Evolved Into a Multistep Malware Delivery Mechanism14 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026Analysis of LLMs Against Prompt Injection and Jailbreak Attacks
- 2026SoK: Robustness in Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks
- 2025PandaGuard: Systematic Evaluation of LLM Safety against Jailbreaking Attacks
- 2024AttackEval: How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Jailbreak Attacking on Large Language Models
- 2025Evolving Security in LLMs: A Study of Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses
- 2024Towards Understanding Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs: A Representation Space Analysis
- 2025Do Methods to Jailbreak and Defend LLMs Generalize Across Languages?
- 2023Analyzing the Inherent Response Tendency of LLMs: Real-World Instructions-Driven Jailbreak