In plain words: A few special tokens with learned word-embeddings are placed before the input to block instructions hidden in outside data, and skipped when no protection is needed. They nearly matched the security of defenses that retrain the model, with barely any drop in answer quality.
Abstract · Defending Against Prompt Injection With a Few DefensiveTokens
When large language model (LLM) systems interact with external data to perform complex tasks, a new attack, namely prompt injection, becomes a significant threat. By injecting instructions into the data accessed by the system, the attacker is able to override the initial user task with an arbitrary task directed by the attacker. To secure the system, test-time defenses, e.g., defensive prompting, have been proposed for system developers to attain security only when needed in a flexible manner. However, they are much less effective than training-time defenses that change the model parameters. Motivated by this, we propose DefensiveToken, a test-time defense with prompt injection robustness comparable to training-time alternatives. DefensiveTokens are newly inserted as special tokens, whose embeddings are optimized for security. In security-sensitive cases, system developers can append a few DefensiveTokens before the LLM input to achieve security with a minimal utility drop. In scenarios where security is less of a concern, developers can simply skip DefensiveTokens; the LLM system remains the same as there is no defense, generating high-quality responses. Thus, DefensiveTokens, if released alongside the model, allow a flexible switch between the state-of-the-art (SOTA) utility and almost-SOTA security at test time. The code is available at https://github.com/Sizhe-Chen/DefensiveToken.
Sizhe Chen, Yizhu Wang, Nicholas Carlini, Chawin Sitawarin, David Wagner
arXiv:2507.07974 · cs.CR · submitted Jul 10, 2025 · updated Aug 25, 2025
abstract · pdf · html