Security--Fidelity Tradeoffs: The Hidden Cost of Prompt Injection Defense

We identify a security-fidelity tradeoff in defending LLMs against indirect prompt injection: defenses resist injected instructions largely by suppressing untrusted text, which corrupts tasks that must preserve it, such as translation and document editing.

Attack-success metrics cannot see this, because a model that ignores an injection and one that faithfully processes it as data score identically.

We introduce SecFid, a benchmark built so that executing an injection, processing it as data, and ignoring it produce distinguishable outputs.

This makes fidelity measurable and exposes a frontier: across 1,168 examples and 48 configurations, no model or defense achieves both objectives.

The highest-fidelity model reaches 96.5% fidelity at 47.8% security, while the most secure defenses invert this, at 99.3% security but only 71.0%-73.9% fidelity.

Even defenses with identical security differ in how they earn it: some repair hijacks into faithful processing, others simply suppress benign content.

A decision-theoretic analysis shows why no fixed choice can be right everywhere: the correct behavior is not a property of the defense but of the deployment, set by its relative cost of a hijack versus a dropped span.

Security alone therefore measures only half of robustness, and reporting it without fidelity hides the price at which it was bought.