Haokai Ma

Suffix-based jailbreak attacks append an adversarial suffix, i.e., a short token sequence, to steer aligned LLMs into unsafe outputs. Since suffixes are free-form text, they admit endlessly many surface forms, making jailbreak mitigation difficult. Most existing defenses depend on passive detection of suspicious suffixes, without leveraging the defender's inherent asymmetric ability to inject secrets and proactively conceal gaps. Motivated by this, we take a controllability-oriented perspective and develop a proactive defense that nudges attackers into a no-win dilemma: either they fall into defender-designed optimization traps and fail to produce an effective adversarial suffix, or they can succeed only by generating adversarial suffixes that carry distinctive, traceable fingerprints. We propose TrapSuffix, a lightweight fine-tuning approach that injects trap-aligned behaviors into the base model without changing the inference pipeline. TrapSuffix channels jailbreak attempts into these two outcomes by reshaping the model's response landscape to adversarial suffixes. Across diverse suffix-based jailbreak settings, TrapSuffix reduces the average attack success rate to below 0.01 percent and achieves an average tracing success rate of 87.9 percent, providing both strong defense and reliable traceability. It introduces no inference-time overhead and incurs negligible memory cost, requiring only 15.87 MB of additional memory on average, whereas state-of-the-art LLM-based detection defenses typically incur memory overheads at the 1e4 MB level, while composing naturally with existing filtering-based defenses for complementary protection.

Web agents have emerged as an effective paradigm for automating interactions with complex web environments, yet remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that embed malicious instructions into webpage content to induce unintended actions. This threat is further amplified for screenshot-based web agents, which operate on rendered visual webpages rather than structured textual representations, making predominant text-centric defenses ineffective. Although multimodal detection methods have been explored, they often rely on large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring significant computational overhead. The bottleneck lies in the complexity of modern webpages: VLMs must comprehend the global semantics of an entire page, resulting in substantial inference time and GPU memory usage. This raises a critical question: can we detect prompt injection attacks from screenshots in a lightweight manner? In this paper, we observe that injected webpages exhibit distinct characteristics compared to benign ones from both visual and textual perspectives. Building on this insight, we propose SnapGuard, a lightweight yet accurate method that reformulates prompt injection detection as multimodal representation analysis over webpage screenshots. SnapGuard leverages two complementary signals: a visual stability indicator that identifies abnormally smooth gradient distributions induced by malicious content, and action-oriented textual signals recovered via contrast-polarity reversal. Extensive evaluations across eight attacks and two benign settings demonstrate that SnapGuard achieves an F1 score of 0.75, outperforming GPT-4o-prompt while being 8x faster (1.81s vs. 14.50s) and introducing no additional memory overhead.