Decoding Guardrails: XAI-Guided Perturbation Analysis of Prompt Injection Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world systems. Given their broader applicability, prompt engineering has become an efficient tool for resource-scarce organizations to adopt LLMs for their own purposes. At the same time, LLMs are vulnerable to prompt-based attacks. Thus, analyzing this risk has become a critical security requirement. This work evaluates prompt-injection and jailbreak vulnerability using a large, manually curated dataset across multiple open-source LLMs, including Phi, Mistral, DeepSeek-R1, Llama 3.2, Qwen, and Gemma variants. We observe significant behavioural variation across models, including refusal responses and complete silent non-responsiveness triggered by internal safety mechanisms. Furthermore, we evaluated several lightweight, inference-time defence mechanisms that operate as filters without any retraining or GPU-intensive fine-tuning. Although these defences mitigate straightforward attacks, they are consistently bypassed by long, reasoning-heavy prompts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but they remain vulnerable to Prompt Injection (PI) and Jailbreak (JB) attacks. In addition, benchmark evaluations may be affected by contamination and partial information leakage, compromising performance estimates. This work presents GuardNet, a guardrail system based on an ensemble of shallow neural networks (BiLSTMs) with approximately 47 million parameters. We investigate the hypothesis that robustness in adversarial scenarios depends more on the diversity of example coverage and threshold calibration than on model scale. The results indicate that GuardNet achieves competitive performance compared with lightweight detectors and high efficiency at low latency, although larger LLMs such as Mistral-7B and Llama-3.1-8B still achieve superior performance in terms of F1 score and AUROC on the blind JBB-Behaviors benchmark. Nevertheless, GuardNet achieves an AUROC of 0.747 on the blind dataset (n = 200) and an F1 score of 0.92 on a proprietary benchmark (n = 50), under threshold calibration and evaluation with declared partial information leakage. The system operates with an average latency of approximately 50 ms on CPU, making it suitable for deployment in production environments with cost and infrastructure constraints.

Prompt attacks, including jailbreaks and prompt injections, pose a critical security risk to Large Language Model (LLM) systems. In production, guardrails must mitigate these attacks under strict low-latency constraints, resulting in a deployment gap in which lightweight classifiers and rule-based systems struggle to generalize under distribution shift, while high-capacity LLM-based judges remain too slow or costly for live enforcement. In this work, we examine whether lightweight, general-purpose LLMs can reliably serve as security judges under real-world production constraints. Through careful prompt and output design, lightweight LLMs are guided through a structured reasoning process involving explicit intent decomposition, safety-signal verification, harm assessment, and self-reflection. We evaluate our method on a curated dataset combining benign queries from real-world chatbots with adversarial prompts generated via automated red teaming (ART), covering diverse and evolving patterns. Our results show that general-purpose LLMs, such as gemini-2.0-flash-lite-001, can serve as effective low-latency judges for live guardrails. This configuration is currently deployed in production as a centralized guardrail service for public service chatbots in Singapore. We additionally evaluate a Mixture-of-Models (MoM) setting to assess whether aggregating multiple LLM judges improves prompt-attack detection performance relative to single-model judges, with only modest gains observed.