Analysis of LLMs Against Prompt Injection and Jailbreak Attacks

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world systems. Given their broader applicability, prompt engineering has become an efficient tool for resource-scarce organizations to adopt LLMs for their own purposes. At the same time, LLMs are vulnerable to prompt-based attacks. Thus, analyzing this risk has become a critical security requirement. This work evaluates prompt-injection and jailbreak vulnerability using a large, manually curated dataset across multiple open-source LLMs, including Phi, Mistral, DeepSeek-R1, Llama 3.2, Qwen, and Gemma variants. We observe significant behavioural variation across models, including refusal responses and complete silent non-responsiveness triggered by internal safety mechanisms. Furthermore, we evaluated several lightweight, inference-time defence mechanisms that operate as filters without any retraining or GPU-intensive fine-tuning. Although these defences mitigate straightforward attacks, they are consistently bypassed by long, reasoning-heavy prompts.