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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced many applications, but are also
known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we introduce a
novel security threat: hijacking AI-human conversations by manipulating LLMs'
system prompts to produce malicious answers only to specific targeted questions
(e.g., "Who should I vote for US President?", "Are Covid vaccines safe?"),
while behaving benignly on others. This attack is detrimental as it can enable
malicious actors to exercise large-scale information manipulation by spreading
harmful but benign-looking system prompts online. To demonstrate such an
attack, we develop CAIN, an algorithm that can automatically curate such
harmful system prompts for a specific target question in a black-box setting or
without the need to access the LLM's parameters. Evaluated on both open-source
and commercial LLMs, CAIN demonstrates significant adversarial impact. In
untargeted attacks or forcing LLMs to output incorrect answers, CAIN achieves
up to 40% F1 degradation on targeted questions while preserving high accuracy
on benign inputs. For targeted attacks or forcing LLMs to output specific
harmful answers, CAIN achieves over 70% F1 scores on these targeted responses
with minimal impact on benign questions. Our results highlight the critical
need for enhanced robustness measures to safeguard the integrity and safety of
LLMs in real-world applications. All source code will be publicly available.