安全对齐的LLM会误拒合法防御请求,因关键词相似被误判为攻击。
Defensive Refusal Bias: How Safety Alignment Fails Cyber Defenders
- 基于真实攻防竞赛数据,发现含安全关键词的防御请求被拒率高2.72倍
- 系统加固和恶意代码分析等关键任务拒绝率最高达43.8%和34.3%
- 明确授权反而增加拒绝率,说明模型误将解释当威胁
大型语言模型(LLMs)在网络安全任务中的安全对齐主要聚焦于防止滥用。尽管该方法减少了直接危害,却掩盖了一种互补性失效:对合法防御者拒绝提供协助。我们研究了“防御性拒绝偏差”——前沿LLM在防御性网络安全任务中,若包含与攻击性任务相似的语言,便会倾向于拒绝协助。基于来自国家大学生网络攻防竞赛(NCCDC)的2,390个真实案例,发现含有安全敏感关键词的防御请求被拒绝的概率是语义等价中性请求的2.72倍(p < 0.001)。拒绝率最高的任务为系统加固(43.8%)和恶意代码分析(34.3%)。有趣的是,当用户明确授权时,拒绝率反而上升,表明模型将理由解释视为对抗性而非免责性。这一现象对交互式使用和自主防御代理至关重要,后者无法重述或重试被拒请求。当前网络安全对齐依赖于语义相似性而非意图或授权判断,我们呼吁通过意图分析来增强防御能力,同时防止有害合规。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to legitimate defenders. We study Defensive Refusal Bias -- the tendency of safety-tuned frontier LLMs to refuse assistance for authorized defensive cybersecurity tasks when those tasks include similar language to an offensive cyber task. Based on 2,390 real-world examples from the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC), we find that LLMs refuse defensive requests containing security-sensitive keywords at $2.72\times$ the rate of semantically equivalent neutral requests ($p < 0.001$). The highest refusal rates occur in the most operationally critical tasks: system hardening (43.8%) and malware analysis (34.3%). Interestingly, explicit authorization, where the user directly instructs the model that they have authority to complete the target task, increases refusal rates, suggesting models interpret justifications as adversarial rather than exculpatory. These findings are urgent for interactive use and critical for autonomous defensive agents, which cannot rephrase refused queries or retry. Our findings suggest that current LLM cybersecurity alignment relies on semantic similarity to harmful content rather than reasoning about intent or authorization. We call for mitigations that analyze intent to maximize defensive capabilities while still preventing harmful compliance.
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