Permissioned LLMs: Enforcing Access Control in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jayaraman, Bargav, Marathe, Virendra J., Mozaffari, Hamid, Shen, William F., Kenthapadi, Krishnaram
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jayaraman, Bargav
Marathe, Virendra J.
Mozaffari, Hamid
Shen, William F.
Kenthapadi, Krishnaram
author_facet Jayaraman, Bargav
Marathe, Virendra J.
Mozaffari, Hamid
Shen, William F.
Kenthapadi, Krishnaram
contents In enterprise settings, organizational data is segregated, siloed and carefully protected by elaborate access control frameworks. These access control structures can completely break down if an LLM fine-tuned on the siloed data serves requests, for downstream tasks, from individuals with disparate access privileges. We propose Permissioned LLMs (PermLLM), a new class of LLMs that superimpose the organizational data access control structures on query responses they generate. We formalize abstractions underpinning the means to determine whether access control enforcement happens correctly over LLM query responses. Our formalism introduces the notion of a relevant response that can be used to prove whether a PermLLM mechanism has been implemented correctly. We also introduce a novel metric, called access advantage, to empirically evaluate the efficacy of a PermLLM mechanism. We introduce three novel PermLLM mechanisms that build on Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning to achieve the desired access control. We furthermore present two instantiations of access advantage--(i) Domain Distinguishability Index (DDI) based on Membership Inference Attacks, and (ii) Utility Gap Index (UGI) based on LLM utility evaluation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our PermLLM mechanisms through extensive experiments on five public datasets (GPQA, RCV1, SimpleQA, WMDP, and PubMedQA), in addition to evaluating the validity of DDI and UGI metrics themselves for quantifying access control in LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Permissioned LLMs: Enforcing Access Control in Large Language Models
Jayaraman, Bargav
Marathe, Virendra J.
Mozaffari, Hamid
Shen, William F.
Kenthapadi, Krishnaram
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
In enterprise settings, organizational data is segregated, siloed and carefully protected by elaborate access control frameworks. These access control structures can completely break down if an LLM fine-tuned on the siloed data serves requests, for downstream tasks, from individuals with disparate access privileges. We propose Permissioned LLMs (PermLLM), a new class of LLMs that superimpose the organizational data access control structures on query responses they generate. We formalize abstractions underpinning the means to determine whether access control enforcement happens correctly over LLM query responses. Our formalism introduces the notion of a relevant response that can be used to prove whether a PermLLM mechanism has been implemented correctly. We also introduce a novel metric, called access advantage, to empirically evaluate the efficacy of a PermLLM mechanism. We introduce three novel PermLLM mechanisms that build on Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning to achieve the desired access control. We furthermore present two instantiations of access advantage--(i) Domain Distinguishability Index (DDI) based on Membership Inference Attacks, and (ii) Utility Gap Index (UGI) based on LLM utility evaluation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our PermLLM mechanisms through extensive experiments on five public datasets (GPQA, RCV1, SimpleQA, WMDP, and PubMedQA), in addition to evaluating the validity of DDI and UGI metrics themselves for quantifying access control in LLMs.
title Permissioned LLMs: Enforcing Access Control in Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22860