Composable Trust for Language Models: A proven boundary and a measured defense
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 to at roughly a clean-quality cost (). Under adaptive red-teaming the proved boundary holds unconditionally, and the measured defense stays at . The cascade also attributes a lower-trust source's fact rather than dropping it, raising attribution from to , 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}
}