English

LlamaFirewall: An open source guardrail system for building secure AI agents

Cryptography and Security 2025-05-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from simple chatbots into autonomous agents capable of performing complex tasks such as editing production code, orchestrating workflows, and taking higher-stakes actions based on untrusted inputs like webpages and emails. These capabilities introduce new security risks that existing security measures, such as model fine-tuning or chatbot-focused guardrails, do not fully address. Given the higher stakes and the absence of deterministic solutions to mitigate these risks, there is a critical need for a real-time guardrail monitor to serve as a final layer of defense, and support system level, use case specific safety policy definition and enforcement. We introduce LlamaFirewall, an open-source security focused guardrail framework designed to serve as a final layer of defense against security risks associated with AI Agents. Our framework mitigates risks such as prompt injection, agent misalignment, and insecure code risks through three powerful guardrails: PromptGuard 2, a universal jailbreak detector that demonstrates clear state of the art performance; Agent Alignment Checks, a chain-of-thought auditor that inspects agent reasoning for prompt injection and goal misalignment, which, while still experimental, shows stronger efficacy at preventing indirect injections in general scenarios than previously proposed approaches; and CodeShield, an online static analysis engine that is both fast and extensible, aimed at preventing the generation of insecure or dangerous code by coding agents. Additionally, we include easy-to-use customizable scanners that make it possible for any developer who can write a regular expression or an LLM prompt to quickly update an agent's security guardrails.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.03574,
  title  = {LlamaFirewall: An open source guardrail system for building secure AI agents},
  author = {Sahana Chennabasappa and Cyrus Nikolaidis and Daniel Song and David Molnar and Stephanie Ding and Shengye Wan and Spencer Whitman and Lauren Deason and Nicholas Doucette and Abraham Montilla and Alekhya Gampa and Beto de Paola and Dominik Gabi and James Crnkovich and Jean-Christophe Testud and Kat He and Rashnil Chaturvedi and Wu Zhou and Joshua Saxe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03574},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:23:04.321Z