ProxyPrompt: Securing System Prompts against Prompt Extraction Attacks

Understand

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into a wide range of applications has highlighted the critical role of well-crafted system prompts, which require extensive testing and domain expertise.

• These prompts enhance task performance but may also encode sensitive information and filtering criteria, posing security risks if exposed.
• Recent research shows that system prompts are vulnerable to extraction attacks, while existing defenses are either easily bypassed or require constant updates to address new threats.
• In this work, we introduce ProxyPrompt, a novel defense mechanism that prevents prompt leakage by replacing the original prompt with a proxy.