Prompt Security
Protect your AI applications from prompt injection, jailbreaks, and adversarial attacks. Learn defense strategies and security best practices.
Prompt Security
Defending AI applications against malicious inputs and ensuring safe, reliable outputs. This is an introduction to the subject — for the full depth on attacks, defense patterns, and testing, see the Prompt Security guide and the other pages in this section.
Why AI Security Matters
AI systems face unique security challenges that traditional application security does not fully address:
| Threat | Description | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt Injection | Malicious instructions embedded in user input that override system prompts | Unauthorized actions, data exposure |
| Jailbreaking | Techniques to bypass safety filters and content policies | Harmful or prohibited outputs |
| Data Leakage | Extraction of system prompts, training data, or user information | Loss of IP, privacy violations |
| Indirect Injection | Malicious content in documents or web pages that the AI reads | Supply-chain style attacks |
| Tool Misuse | Tricking the AI into misusing connected tools or APIs | Unauthorized operations |
The Defense-in-Depth Approach
Security for AI applications requires multiple layers of defense working together:
- System Prompt Design — Clear, authoritative instructions that resist override
- Input Validation — Sanitize and inspect user inputs before they reach the model
- Output Monitoring — Check model outputs for policy violations or sensitive data
- Guardrails — Runtime constraints on what the model can do and access
- Human Oversight — Approval flows for high-risk actions
Note:
No single defense is sufficient. Always layer multiple security measures. A well-hardened system prompt combined with strict guardrails is far more resilient than either approach alone.
Topics in This Section
- Prompt Security - Injection attacks, jailbreaks, and full defense strategies
- Prompt Injection Defense - Detecting and blocking direct and indirect injection
- Agentic Guardrails - Tool access control, human-in-the-loop patterns, and safety for agentic systems
- Constitutional AI - Using principles to constrain model behavior
- Multimodal Injection - Attacks and defenses for image, audio, and video inputs
Related Articles & Guides
Prompt Security
Learn about prompt injection attacks, jailbreaks, and how to secure your AI applications against malicious prompts and adversarial inputs.
Guardrails for Agentic Systems
Implement guardrails for AI agents: tool access control, input validation, human-in-the-loop gates, rate limiting, and output redaction for production systems.
Multimodal Injection: Defending Vision-Language Models
Image-based prompt injection attacks against GPT-4V, Claude 3, and Gemini. Defense strategies including preprocessing, OCR redaction, and separate vision pipelines.