English

Composable Trust for Language Models: A proven boundary and a measured defense

Cryptography and Security 2026-07-14 v1

Abstract

In a language model, instructions and data share one token stream, so nothing inside the model's generation can keep untrusted text from steering it. We develop a trust model that places the authority to act outside the model, in code: a source's standing, not its content, decides which operation runs and whether it acts. A lower-trust source may inform an answer but not override a higher one. An unmodified model runs inside a deterministic pipeline that ranks inputs by source integrity, and a fixed non-model monitor provably chooses the operation and any outside action from trusted inputs alone. We can measure but not prove the pipeline's resistance to injection; we prompt-tune it and report the rate. On a one-shot held-out set with an unmodified Gemma~4 26B model, passivation and a wrapper (the cascade) raise the genuine-leak defended rate from 27%27\% to 94%94\% at roughly a 4%4\% clean-quality cost (Qrel=0.96Q_{\mathrm{rel}}{=}0.96). Under adaptive red-teaming the proved boundary holds unconditionally, and the measured defense stays at 87%87\%. The cascade also attributes a lower-trust source's fact rather than dropping it, raising attribution from 0%0\% to 92%92\%, and follows the higher-trust source on a conflict.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.13149,
  title  = {Composable Trust for Language Models: A proven boundary and a measured defense},
  author = {Yakov Pyotr Shkolnikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13149},
  year   = {2026}
}