CyberSecEval Prompt Injection
Models face text prompts that embed injected instructions across 15 strategies. Scored as attack success rate.
Part of CyberSecEval 2 and later versions. The repo ships an English set (prompt_injection.json) and a machine-translated multilingual set. Inspect Evals ports the multilingual set as cyse4_multilingual_prompt_injection (1,004 items).
In the authors’ words
Large language models (LLMs) introduce new security risks, but there are few comprehensive evaluation suites to measure and reduce these risks. We present BenchmarkName, a novel benchmark to quantify LLM security risks and capabilities. We introduce two new areas for testing: prompt injection and code interpreter abuse. We evaluated multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, including GPT-4, Mistral, Meta Llama 3 70B-Instruct, and Code Llama. Our results show that conditioning away risk of attack remains an unsolved problem; for example, all tested models showed between 26% and 41% successful prompt injection tests. We further introduce the safety-utility tradeoff: conditioning an LLM to reject unsafe prompts can cause the LLM to falsely reject answering benign prompts, which lowers utility. We propose quantifying this tradeoff using False Refusal Rate (FRR). As an illustration, we introduce a novel test set to quantify FRR for cyberattack helpfulness risk. We find many LLMs able to successfully comply with "borderline" benign requests while still rejecting most unsafe requests. Finally, we quantify the utility of LLMs for automating a core cybersecurity task, that of exploiting software vulnerabilities. This is important because the offensive capabilities of LLMs are of intense interest; we quantify this by creating novel test sets for four representative problems. We find that models with coding capabilities perform better than those without, but that further work is needed for LLMs to become proficient at exploit generation. Our code is open source and can be used to evaluate other LLMs.
- Level
- Everyday Most adults, without training
- Scored
- Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
- Answers
- Open-ended Free-form text, documents, designs or media judged as a whole.
Llama 3.1-8B leads with 19% among models released by Jul 2024
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in Jul 2024, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- GPT-6.1 Terra
- GPT-6.1 Sol
- and 16 more
- 1
Llama 3.1-8B 19%
- 2
Llama 3.1-405B 21.7%
- 3
Llama 3.1-70B 26%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 19% | Nov 2024 | Model card | |
| 2 | | 21.7% | Nov 2024 | Model card | |
| 3 | | 26% | Nov 2024 | Model card |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Labs report it only in system cards
We read the headline results of 479 launch posts from 51 labs, and none of them list this benchmark. Some system cards do, below.
3 system cards report it, from 1 lab
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Nov 2024 | | 19 | Text-based prompt injection success rate, average over strategies 0.19 (Figure 22 label) | Robustness |
| 23 Nov 2024 | | 26 | Text-based prompt injection success rate, average over strategies 0.26 (Figure 22 label) | Robustness |
| 23 Nov 2024 | | 21.7 | Text-based prompt injection success rate 21.7% (5.4.5 text). Figure 22 average label = 0.22 | Robustness |
More in Safety and alignment
- FORTRESS In use Paired adversarial and benign national-security misuse prompts. Rubric-graded risk score on adversarial and over-refusal score on benign prompts. Claude Opus 5.5 5.78%
- StrongREJECT In use Forbidden-prompt jailbreak benchmark with a rubric grader that scores how useful a non-refusal actually is.
Inkling 98.6%
- AgentDojo In use Agents do tool-use tasks while tools and data carry prompt injections. Attack success rate counts hijacked runs. Grok 4 Fast 0%
- MASK In use Measures whether a model contradicts its own elicited beliefs under pressure to lie. Honesty separated from accuracy.
Muse Spark Open 98.1%
- Gray Swan IPI Arena benchmark In use Indirect prompt-injection attacks from public red-teaming competitions replayed on tool, coding and browser agents. Attack success rate at k attempts. GPT-6 Astra 8.50%
- Agentic misalignment suite (Anthropic) In use Agents in simulated company settings face threats or goal conflicts that invite blackmail, leaking or sabotage. Score is the misaligned action rate. Claude Sonnet 4.5 0%