Defeating Prompt Injections by Design

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813v1
• Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:54:10 GMT
• Title: Defeating Prompt Injections by Design
• Authors: Edoardo Debenedetti, Ilia Shumailov, Tianqi Fan, Jamie Hayes, Nicholas Carlini, Daniel Fabian, Christoph Kern, Chongyang Shi, Andreas Terzis, Florian Tramèr,
• Abstract summary: CaMeL is a robust defense that creates a protective system layer around the Large Language Models (LLMs)<n>To operate, CaMeL explicitly extracts the control and data flows from the (trusted) query.<n>We demonstrate effectiveness of CaMeL by solving $67%$ of tasks with provable security in AgentDojo [NeurIPS 2024], a recent agentic security benchmark.
• Score: 79.00910871948787
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic systems that interact with an external environment. However, LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks when handling untrusted data. In this paper we propose CaMeL, a robust defense that creates a protective system layer around the LLM, securing it even when underlying models may be susceptible to attacks. To operate, CaMeL explicitly extracts the control and data flows from the (trusted) query; therefore, the untrusted data retrieved by the LLM can never impact the program flow. To further improve security, CaMeL relies on a notion of a capability to prevent the exfiltration of private data over unauthorized data flows. We demonstrate effectiveness of CaMeL by solving $67\%$ of tasks with provable security in AgentDojo [NeurIPS 2024], a recent agentic security benchmark.

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