This research proposes a novel defense mechanism that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to proactively identify and block jailbreak attempts before generating harmful responses.

• SCoT: Safety Chain-of-Thought approach that analyzes inputs for potential safety risks
• Improved Protection: Outperforms conventional defenses against sophisticated jailbreak attacks
• Reasoning Over Refusing: Moves beyond simple refusal to intelligent safety evaluation
• Adaptable Security: Works across different threat types and domains including rare cases

This advancement matters for security professionals as it represents a significant shift from reactive to proactive defense strategies, potentially reducing vulnerabilities in LLM deployments across sensitive applications.

Enhancing Model Defense Against Jailbreaks with Proactive Safety Reasoning