A Sentence Relation-Based Approach to Sanitizing Malicious Instructions

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Datta, Soumil, Umble, Melissa, Brown, Daniel S., Tao, Guanhong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915973766840320
author Datta, Soumil
Umble, Melissa
Brown, Daniel S.
Tao, Guanhong
author_facet Datta, Soumil
Umble, Melissa
Brown, Daniel S.
Tao, Guanhong
contents Retrieval-augmented generation and tool-integrated LLM agents increasingly depend on external textual sources. This reliance broadens the available attack surface, allowing adversaries to insert malicious instructions that trigger unintended model behaviors. Current defensive measures often utilize LLM-based detectors to filter such content, but these approaches remain vulnerable to optimization-based attacks. Additionally, training-based methods frequently fail to generalize to novel data distributions. To resolve these issues, we introduce SONAR, a prompt sanitization framework that identifies and removes injected content using metrics from natural language inference. Specifically, SONAR constructs a sentence-level relational graph across the user query and external data. By using entailment and contradiction scores as edge weights, the system identifies sentences that deviate from the core task. It then employs connectivity-driven pruning to eliminate flagged injection seeds and their related neighbors while maintaining benign context. Rigorous evaluations across several models and datasets show that SONAR reduces the attack success rate to nearly zero, significantly outperforming nine established baseline defenses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Sentence Relation-Based Approach to Sanitizing Malicious Instructions
Datta, Soumil
Umble, Melissa
Brown, Daniel S.
Tao, Guanhong
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-augmented generation and tool-integrated LLM agents increasingly depend on external textual sources. This reliance broadens the available attack surface, allowing adversaries to insert malicious instructions that trigger unintended model behaviors. Current defensive measures often utilize LLM-based detectors to filter such content, but these approaches remain vulnerable to optimization-based attacks. Additionally, training-based methods frequently fail to generalize to novel data distributions. To resolve these issues, we introduce SONAR, a prompt sanitization framework that identifies and removes injected content using metrics from natural language inference. Specifically, SONAR constructs a sentence-level relational graph across the user query and external data. By using entailment and contradiction scores as edge weights, the system identifies sentences that deviate from the core task. It then employs connectivity-driven pruning to eliminate flagged injection seeds and their related neighbors while maintaining benign context. Rigorous evaluations across several models and datasets show that SONAR reduces the attack success rate to nearly zero, significantly outperforming nine established baseline defenses.
title A Sentence Relation-Based Approach to Sanitizing Malicious Instructions
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01078