Prompt Injection Attacks on LLMs

LLM: Large Language Model

Overview

Prompt injection studies how content supplied as data—such as retrieved documents, webpages, tool outputs, memories, images, and audio—can be treated as instructions and divert a model or agent from its intended task. Attack methods range from role and delimiter tricks to hidden or fragmented payloads, adaptive black-box search, gradient-based optimization, and reinforcement-learning red teaming; evaluations cover retrieval-augmented generation, web and computer-use agents, coding, and multi-turn tasks. Defenses include detection and sanitization, provenance-aware separation of trusted instructions from untrusted data, runtime action auditing, and model-level training or activation interventions. Results depend strongly on the model, input channel, and attacker adaptivity, leaving a central tension between blocking harmful actions and preserving useful content and authorized tasks; success on static benchmarks may not predict deployment robustness.

Latest papers

CardsList

125 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, up 111% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Heads of Security: Learned Attention Gates Improve Prompt Injection Robustness

    Oct 27, 2026Igor Shilov, Xiaoxue Yang, Alexander Panfilov +6LLM SecurityPrompt Injection Defense

  2. SoK: PIAtlas: Decomposing the Unbounded Prompt Injection Attack Space

    Oct 18, 2026Stavros Damianakis, Konstantinos PsounisPrompt Injection AttacksPrompt Injection Attacks on LLMs

  3. StableJudge: A Lightweight Adversarial Defense Framework for LLM-as-a-Judge

    Oct 12, 2026Anning Hu, Yangyu Li, Yuqi Huang +2LLM-as-a-JudgePrompt Injection Defense

  4. LTBD: Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters for Prompt Injection Defense

    Oct 8, 2026Luman Zhao, Minghui Xu, Yue Zhang +1LLM SecurityPrompt Injection Defense

  5. Secure Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models

    Oct 6, 2026Yichi Zhang, Zhiqi Wang, Neil Gong +1Adversarial Attacks on LLMsSpeculative Decoding

  6. RAG-PIBench: A Leakage-Aware Benchmark for Prompt-Injection Detection in Trustworthy RAG Systems

    Oct 6, 2026Niveen O. Jaffal, Ahmet Yuksel, David MohaisenRAG SecurityPrompt Injection Attacks on LLMs

  7. RAISED: Self-Distillation for Robustness to Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

    Oct 5, 2026Mohamed Dhouib, Clement Elliker, Alexi Canesse +5Prompt Injection DefenseLLM Agents

  8. Can CaMeLs Talk? Securing Multi-Agent Systems Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

    Oct 5, 2026James Peters-Gill, Avi Semler, Henning Bartsch +2AI Agent Security BenchmarksInformation Flow Control

  9. Readable Before Actionable: Causal Tracing of Indirect Prompt Injection

    Oct 4, 2026Zhe Yu, Wenpeng Xing, Xingxing Yang +1Causal Reasoning in Language ModelsIndirect Prompt Injection

  10. Blocking at the Boundary: Auditing Long-Horizon Agents against Staged Prompt Injection

    Oct 4, 2026Jingkai Liu, Yufei Han, Xiaoting Lyu +2Prompt InjectionAI Agent Auditing

  11. Large Language Models and Augmented Democracy

    Oct 3, 2026Jairo Gudiño-RoseroDigital TwinsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

  12. Divide and Inject: Can Agents Reconstruct an Indirect Prompt Injection from Fragments?

    Sep 29, 2026Michael Lee, Zhipeng Wei, Yue Dong +1Indirect Prompt InjectionPrompt Injection Attacks

  13. Render Before Reading: Visual Rendering as a Prompt Injection Defense

    Sep 28, 2026Jie Zhang, Andrei Baroian, Jan N. van Rijn +2Multimodal Large Language ModelsModality Gap in VLMs

  14. Same Bytes, Different Authority: Reserved-Token Representations in Chat-Template Prompt Injection

    Sep 28, 2026Yan Zhan, Yunze Song, Mengkai Hou +3Prompt InjectionPrompt Injection Defense

  15. CoDeL: Co-Evolutionary Defense against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM-based Agents

    Sep 28, 2026Xiao Yang, Yangchen Ou, Yuhan Gao +3Adversarial TrainingLLM Agent Security

  16. Climbing the Hill: Prompt Injection Red-Teaming Against Frontier Models with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 27, 2026Chenlong Yin, Xiaolong Jin, Wei Zou +2Adversarial Attacks on LLMsLLM Red Teaming

  17. ENDOPROMPT: Victim-Side Pseudo-References for Utility Degradation

    Sep 24, 2026Qingyu Wu, Zeyu Feng, Yongda Yu +2Adversarial Prompt GenerationPrompt Injection Attacks

  18. Prefilling the Reasoning Channel: Output-Prefix Attacks on Reasoning LLMs

    Sep 24, 2026Lukáš Brůna, Robert Bridges, Adam EkAdversarial Attacks on LLMsPrompt Injection Attacks

  19. ActGuard: Pre-execution Action Auditing against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

    Sep 14, 2026Bingzheng Wang, Xiaoyan Gu, Wentao Wang +3Runtime Enforcement for AI AgentsPrompt Injection Defense

  20. DriftNet: A Dual-Head Trajectory Transformer for Detecting and Localizing Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

    Sep 9, 2026Asif Pinjari, Mithun Paul Saint-GermainAI Agent Security BenchmarksAI Agent Monitoring

  21. An Experimental Evaluation of Multimodal Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic AI Frameworks

    Sep 8, 2026Viet K. Nguyen, Mohammad I. HusainAI Agent SecurityAI Agent Security Benchmarks

  22. CoER: Defending against Adaptive Indirect Prompt Injection via Adversarial Co-Evolution and Refinement

    Sep 7, 2026Boyang Zhang, Qingxin Xiao, Lingwei Dang +1Reinforcement LearningAI Agent Security