KDA: A Knowledge-Distilled Attacker for Generating Diverse Prompts to Jailbreak LLMs

Jailbreak attacks exploit specific prompts to bypass LLM safeguards, causing the LLM to generate harmful, inappropriate, and misaligned content. Current jailbreaking methods rely heavily on carefully designed system prompts and numerous queries to achieve a single successful attack, which is costly and impractical for large-scale red-teaming. To address this challenge, we propose to distill the knowledge of an ensemble of SOTA attackers into a single open-source model, called Knowledge-Distilled Attacker (KDA), which is finetuned to automatically generate coherent and diverse attack prompts without the need for meticulous system prompt engineering. Compared to existing attackers, KDA achieves higher attack success rates and greater cost-time efficiency when targeting multiple SOTA open-source and commercial black-box LLMs. Furthermore, we conducted a quantitative diversity analysis of prompts generated by baseline methods and KDA, identifying diverse and ensemble attacks as key factors behind KDA's effectiveness and efficiency.