CRAILGSDASMay 20, 2025

AudioJailbreak: Jailbreak Attacks against End-to-End Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2505.14103v219 citationsh-index: 12IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Originality Highly original
AI Analysis

This work addresses security vulnerabilities in end-to-end LALMs, which is a domain-specific problem for AI safety and robustness, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.

The paper tackles the problem of jailbreak attacks against large audio-language models (LALMs) by proposing AudioJailbreak, a novel audio attack that achieves high effectiveness with features like asynchrony, universality, stealthiness, and over-the-air robustness, as demonstrated through extensive experiments on multiple LALMs.

Jailbreak attacks to Large audio-language models (LALMs) are studied recently, but they achieve suboptimal effectiveness, applicability, and practicability, particularly, assuming that the adversary can fully manipulate user prompts. In this work, we first conduct an extensive experiment showing that advanced text jailbreak attacks cannot be easily ported to end-to-end LALMs via text-to speech (TTS) techniques. We then propose AudioJailbreak, a novel audio jailbreak attack, featuring (1) asynchrony: the jailbreak audio does not need to align with user prompts in the time axis by crafting suffixal jailbreak audios; (2) universality: a single jailbreak perturbation is effective for different prompts by incorporating multiple prompts into perturbation generation; (3) stealthiness: the malicious intent of jailbreak audios will not raise the awareness of victims by proposing various intent concealment strategies; and (4) over-the-air robustness: the jailbreak audios remain effective when being played over the air by incorporating the reverberation distortion effect with room impulse response into the generation of the perturbations. In contrast, all prior audio jailbreak attacks cannot offer asynchrony, universality, stealthiness, or over-the-air robustness. Moreover, AudioJailbreak is also applicable to the adversary who cannot fully manipulate user prompts, thus has a much broader attack scenario. Extensive experiments with thus far the most LALMs demonstrate the high effectiveness of AudioJailbreak. We highlight that our work peeks into the security implications of audio jailbreak attacks against LALMs, and realistically fosters improving their security robustness. The implementation and audio samples are available at our website https://audiojailbreak.github.io/AudioJailbreak.

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