Security Assessment and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Defensive Framework
Taiwo Onitiju , Iman Vakilinia
Published on arXiv
2603.17123
Prompt Injection
OWASP LLM Top 10 — LLM01
Key Finding
Reveals 2.5x variation in LLM security robustness (Gemini-2.5-pro 29.8% vulnerable vs LLaMA-2-70B 11.9%) and defensive framework achieves 68-94% detection across attack categories
Large Language Models increasingly power critical infrastructure from healthcare to finance, yet their vulnerability to adversarial manipulation threatens system integrity and user safety. Despite growing deployment, no comprehensive comparative security assessment exists across major LLM architectures, leaving organizations unable to quantify risk or select appropriately secure LLMs for sensitive applications. This research addresses this gap by establishing a standardized vulnerability assessment framework and developing a multi-layered defensive system to protect against identified threats. We systematically evaluate five widely-deployed LLM families GPT-4, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-3 Haiku, LLaMA-2-70B, and Gemini-2.5-pro against 10,000 adversarial prompts spanning six attack categories. Our assessment reveals critical security disparities, with vulnerability rates ranging from 11.9\% to 29.8\%, demonstrating that LLM capability does not correlate with security robustness. To mitigate these risks, we develop a production-ready defensive framework achieving 83\% average detection accuracy with only 5\% false positives. These results demonstrate that systematic security assessment combined with external defensive measures provides a viable path toward safer LLM deployment in production environments.
Key Contributions
- Standardized vulnerability assessment framework evaluating 5 major LLM families against 10,000 adversarial prompts across 6 attack categories
- Comparative security analysis revealing vulnerability rates ranging from 11.9% to 29.8% across different LLM architectures
- Production-ready multi-layered defensive framework achieving 83% average detection accuracy with 5% false positive rate