arXiv AI

Security--Fidelity Tradeoffs: The Hidden Cost of Prompt Injection Defense

arXiv:2606. 30783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify a security-fidelity tradeoff in defending LLMs against indirect prompt injection: defenses resist injected instructions largely by suppressing untrusted text, which corrupts tasks that must preserve it, such as translation and document editing.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

APEX: Active Protection at Execution Boundaries for LLM Agents

The paper introduces APEX, an active defense for large language model agents that protects against indirect prompt injection by enforcing safety at execution boundaries. APEX uses an evidence‑gated prevention contract and deception‑based exposure to ensure that only authorized effects, endorsed by the task, are executed. Evaluation shows APEX achieves near‑zero attack success across multiple benchmarks and capability‑unit types, outperforming 13 baseline defenses.

By Xinran Zheng, Xin Fan Guo, Zhiqiang Hao, Fan Yang, Xingzhi Qian, Jiawei Du, Jinfeng Xu, Zheng Xing, Shuo Yang, Xingjun Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28

Heads of Security: Learned Attention Gates Improve Prompt Injection Robustness

arXiv:2610. 37657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Heads of Security (HoS), a prompt injection defense that enforces instruction-data separation via a small set of learned per-head attention gates.

By Igor Shilov, Xiaoxue Yang, Alexander Panfilov, Evgenii Kortukov, Matthieu Meeus, Peter Romov, Wojciech Samek, Jonas Geiping, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
arXiv AI
4d ago

SecPO: Principled Adversarial Training for Prompt Injection Security

SecPO introduces a principled adversarial training framework to defend large language models against prompt injection attacks. By approximating an ideal injection‑invariant reference model and employing a new SecPO loss, the authors improve security while preserving utility. Combined with an efficient adversarial training pipeline that synthesizes strong injected inputs, the resulting SecPO + AT model significantly reduces attack success rates compared to existing defenses and maintains performance across multiple benchmarks.

By Sizhe Chen, Yibo Peng, Jaewon Chang, Chawin Sitawarin, David Wagner
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Auditing Prompt Injection Defenses Before They Reach Users: What Strong Adversaries Reveal

The paper examines how fine‑tuned defenses against prompt injection in large language models can be audited before deployment. By leveraging intermediate checkpoints from the fine‑tuning process, the authors create strong optimization‑based attacks (e.g., GCG and BEAST) that dramatically increase attack success rates—from near zero to up to 96%—against state‑of‑the‑art defenses. This demonstrates that current empirical evaluations often overestimate robustness and that pre‑deployment stress‑testing can uncover real vulnerabilities.

By Xiaoxue Yang, Bozhidar Stevanoski, Matthieu Meeus, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
arXiv AI
Oct 27

SentryBench: A Cost-Sensitive Benchmark for Adversarial Robustness of Tool-Using LLM Agents in Public-Safety Deployments

SentryBench is a cost‑sensitive benchmark designed to evaluate large language model agents that use tools in public‑safety contexts. It measures agents on a frontier that jointly considers attack success, over‑refusal (missing real emergencies), and over‑reaction (unwarranted actions) under adversarial tool use, using scenarios grounded in real emergency‑call transcripts and disaster messages. The study shows that naive caution leads to high harm, while a targeted trust‑gate wrapper reduces harm across models and defenses.

By Md Abu Yusuf, Oyshi Tabassum Aditi, Md Faysal Hosain Mazed
arXiv AI
Oct 9

One Word Opens the Gate: The Option-Channel Attack on Typed Decision Models as Agent Guardrails

The paper investigates typed decision models used as guardrails in agent systems, evaluating seven open‑weight models on tasks such as prompt‑injection, jailbreak, and toxic‑content screening. Accuracy for allow‑or‑block decisions ranges from 36% to 72% above chance, with models either over‑allowing or over‑blocking. The authors demonstrate that simple textual manipulations—like adding misleading names or server log lines—can dramatically increase fail‑open rates, and that all tested defenses can be bypassed, suggesting these models are unsuitable as the sole decision component.

By Seyedarmin Azizi, Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Massoud Pedram