Papers › CyberSecEval 2: A Wide-Ranging Cybersecurity Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models

CyberSecEval 2: A Wide-Ranging Cybersecurity Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models

19 Apr 2024arXiv:2404.13161archive 2025-07-28

Manish Bhatt, Sahana Chennabasappa, Yue Li, Cyrus Nikolaidis, Daniel Song, Shengye Wan, Faizan Ahmad, Cornelius Aschermann, Yaohui Chen, Dhaval Kapil, David Molnar, Spencer Whitman, Joshua Saxe

Large language models (LLMs) introduce new security risks, but there are few comprehensive evaluation suites to measure and reduce these risks. We present BenchmarkName, a novel benchmark to quantify LLM security risks and capabilities. We introduce two new areas for testing: prompt injection and code interpreter abuse. We evaluated multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, including GPT-4, Mistral, Meta Llama 3 70B-Instruct, and Code Llama. Our results show that conditioning away risk of attack remains an unsolved problem; for example, all tested models showed between 26% and 41% successful prompt injection tests. We further introduce the safety-utility tradeoff: conditioning an LLM to reject unsafe prompts can cause the LLM to falsely reject answering benign prompts, which lowers utility. We propose quantifying this tradeoff using False Refusal Rate (FRR). As an illustration, we introduce a novel test set to quantify FRR for cyberattack helpfulness risk. We find many LLMs able to successfully comply with "borderline" benign requests while still rejecting most unsafe requests. Finally, we quantify the utility of LLMs for automating a core cybersecurity task, that of exploiting software vulnerabilities. This is important because the offensive capabilities of LLMs are of intense interest; we quantify this by creating novel test sets for four representative problems. We find that models with coding capabilities perform better than those without, but that further work is needed for LLMs to become proficient at exploit generation. Our code is open source and can be used to evaluate other LLMs.

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