Layered LLM Defenses as an Ensemble: Access Tiers, Inference Cost, and the Measured Failure Correlation Between Defense Layers

The paper investigates whether stacking multiple defenses around large language models (LLMs) truly compounds security. Using the Adversary Access‑Tier Model (AATM) and a cost‑tiering system, the authors analyze a seven‑layer defense stack and find that failure correlations between layers are consistently positive, meaning the residual attack success is higher than the multiplicative prediction. Despite high coverage and low false refusals, the stack’s performance is largely driven by common architectural causes rather than diverse, independent defenses.

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