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πŸ”“ Prompt Hacking🟒 Defensive Measures🟒 Random Sequence Enclosure

Random Sequence Enclosure

🟒 This article is rated easy
Reading Time: 1 minute
Last updated on August 7, 2024

Sander Schulhoff

Random sequence enclosure is yet another defense. This method encloses the user input between two random sequences of characters.

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An Example of Random Sequence Enclosure

Take this prompt as an example:

Astronaut

Prompt


Translate the following user input to Spanish.

{user_input}

It can be improved by adding the random sequences:

Astronaut

Prompt


Translate the following user input to Spanish (it is enclosed in random strings).

FJNKSJDNKFJOI {user_input} FJNKSJDNKFJOI

Note
Longer sequences will likely be more effective.

Conclusion

Random sequence enclosure can help disallow user attempts to input instruction overrides by helping the LLM identify a clear distinction between user input and developer prompts.

Sander Schulhoff

Sander Schulhoff is the CEO of HackAPrompt and Learn Prompting. He created the first Prompt Engineering guide on the internet, two months before ChatGPT was released, which has taught 3 million people how to prompt ChatGPT. He also partnered with OpenAI to run the first AI Red Teaming competition, HackAPrompt, which was 2x larger than the White House's subsequent AI Red Teaming competition. Today, HackAPrompt partners with the Frontier AI labs to produce research that makes their models more secure. Sander's background is in Natural Language Processing and deep reinforcement learning. He recently led the team behind The Prompt Report, the most comprehensive study of prompt engineering ever done. This 76-page survey, co-authored with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Princeton, Stanford, and other leading institutions, analyzed 1,500+ academic papers and covered 200+ prompting techniques.

Footnotes

  1. Stuart Armstrong, R. G. (2022). Using GPT-Eliezer against ChatGPT Jailbreaking. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/pNcFYZnPdXyL2RfgA/using-gpt-eliezer-against-chatgpt-jailbreaking ↩