AttacksarXiv 2604.01039
Evaluating and hardening LLM system instructions against encoding attack extraction
Extract system instructions with encoding and structured requests, and harden them by rewriting with CoT
- arXiv
- 2604.01039
- Published
- Layer
- Prompt layer
- Setting
- Models and APIs
- Attacker
- Black-box
- Evaluated models
- GPT-4.1-mini, GPT-3.5-turbo, Gemini-2.5-flash and others7
- AttacksExtraction and theft
- TechniqueEncoding and obfuscation
AbstractEncoded requests can elicit system instructions after a direct refusal.
This work evaluates and hardens the confidentiality of LLM system instructions under encoded extraction. The authors are concerned with: when direct extraction has been rejected, whether the model still surrenders protected content when the same request is rewritten as a formatting or encoding task.