Has My System Prompt Been Used? Large Language Model Prompt Membership Inference

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission12940 Authors

Keywords: privacy, membership inference attack, prompt extraction

TL;DR: We develop Prompt Detective, a statistical method to reliably determine whether a given system prompt was used by a third-party language model.

Abstract: Prompt engineering has emerged as a powerful technique for optimizing large language models (LLMs) for specific applications, enabling faster prototyping and improved performance, and giving rise to the interest of the community in protecting proprietary system prompts. In this work, we explore a novel perspective on prompt privacy through the lens of membership inference. We develop Prompt Detective, a statistical method to reliably determine whether a given system prompt was used by a third-party language model. Our approach relies on a statistical test comparing the distributions of two groups of generations corresponding to different system prompts. Through extensive experiments with a variety of language models, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Prompt Detective in both standard and challenging scenarios, including black-box settings. Our work reveals that even minor changes in system prompts manifest in distinct response distributions, enabling us to verify prompt usage with statistical significance.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 12940