Scalable Defense against In-the-wild Jailbreaking Attacks with Safety Context Retrieval

Taiye Chen, Zeming Wei, Ang Li, Yisen Wang

Keywords: LLM safety, Retrieval-augmented generation, Jailbreak defense

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, where adversarial prompts elicit harmful responses, raising concerns about their real-world safety. While existing defense mechanisms partially mitigate such risks, subsequent advancements in adversarial techniques have enabled novel jailbreaking methods to circumvent these protections, exposing the limitations of static defense frameworks. In this work, we explore defending against evolving jailbreaking threats through the lens of context retrieval. First, we conduct a preliminary study demonstrating that even a minimal set of safety-aligned examples against a particular jailbreak can significantly enhance robustness against this attack pattern. Building on this insight, we further leverage the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques and propose Safety Context Retrieval (SCR), a scalable and robust safeguarding paradigm for LLMs against jailbreaking. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate how SCR achieves superior defensive performance against both established and emerging jailbreaking tactics, contributing a new paradigm to LLM safety.

Submission Number: 63