Reasoning as a Weapon: Adaptive Dual-Path Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of applications. Despite advances in safety alignment, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing methods mainly rely on input-level deception to conceal harmful intent, overlooking a more fundamental attack surface: harmful intent can emerge during reasoning even when absent from the input. To study this gap, we propose ReDPJ, a Reasoning-guided Dual-Path Jailbreak framework that shifts attacks from prompt manipulation to reasoning manipulation. ReDPJ first converts harmful intent into benign dual-modal adversarial anchors, then adaptively guides reasoning to reconstruct latent harmful intent and steer the model toward unsafe trajectories. This design reduces explicit malicious signals in the input while exploiting vulnerabilities in the model's reasoning process. Experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate strong effectiveness, achieving ASRs of 82.1% on GPT-4o-2024-11-20, 85.1% on Llama-3-8B-Instruct, and 88.2% on DeepSeek-V3.