CySecBench: Generative AI-based CyberSecurity-focused Prompt Dataset for Benchmarking Large Language Models
Johan Wahréus , Ahmed Mohamed Hussain , Panos Papadimitratos
Published on arXiv
2501.01335
Prompt Injection
OWASP LLM Top 10 — LLM01
Key Finding
Prompt obfuscation attack achieves 88% jailbreak success rate on Gemini and 65% on ChatGPT, with Claude showing greater resilience at only 17%; method outperforms state-of-the-art on AdvBench at 78.5%
CySecBench prompt obfuscation jailbreak
Novel technique introduced
Numerous studies have investigated methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate harmful content. Typically, these methods are evaluated using datasets of malicious prompts designed to bypass security policies established by LLM providers. However, the generally broad scope and open-ended nature of existing datasets can complicate the assessment of jailbreaking effectiveness, particularly in specific domains, notably cybersecurity. To address this issue, we present and publicly release CySecBench, a comprehensive dataset containing 12662 prompts specifically designed to evaluate jailbreaking techniques in the cybersecurity domain. The dataset is organized into 10 distinct attack-type categories, featuring close-ended prompts to enable a more consistent and accurate assessment of jailbreaking attempts. Furthermore, we detail our methodology for dataset generation and filtration, which can be adapted to create similar datasets in other domains. To demonstrate the utility of CySecBench, we propose and evaluate a jailbreaking approach based on prompt obfuscation. Our experimental results show that this method successfully elicits harmful content from commercial black-box LLMs, achieving Success Rates (SRs) of 65% with ChatGPT and 88% with Gemini; in contrast, Claude demonstrated greater resilience with a jailbreaking SR of 17%. Compared to existing benchmark approaches, our method shows superior performance, highlighting the value of domain-specific evaluation datasets for assessing LLM security measures. Moreover, when evaluated using prompts from a widely used dataset (i.e., AdvBench), it achieved an SR of 78.5%, higher than the state-of-the-art methods.
Key Contributions
- CySecBench: a publicly released dataset of 12,662 close-ended, cybersecurity-focused prompts organized into 10 attack-type categories for evaluating LLM jailbreaking
- A dataset generation and filtration methodology adaptable to other domains
- A prompt obfuscation jailbreaking approach achieving 65% SR on ChatGPT, 88% on Gemini, and 78.5% on AdvBench (surpassing state-of-the-art)