pikit: A Composable Toolkit for Indirect Prompt Injection Research and Evaluation

Abstract

Indirect prompt injection embeds malicious instructions within external content retrieved by LLM-based agents, altering target behavior without user authorization. We introduce pikit, a research toolkit designed to systematically evaluate these threats across three core dimensions: attacks (13 methods), channels (16 carriers across text and file modes), and defenses (9 prevention strategies and 3 offline detection baselines). Built on a decorator-based registry, pikit enables seamless extension of custom components without modifying core code, while a unified craft() API composes arbitrary attacks and channels in a single call. We evaluated the toolkit on the pi coding agent powered by an anonymized LLM in a production-like environment. Benchmarking 9 prevention strategies against high-risk attacks yields a 71.8\% relative reduction in attack success rate, with few\_shot\_warning and instruction\_hierarchy providing the strongest protection. Offline detection baselines achieve perfect precision but low recall, demonstrating that heuristic detectors complement rather than replace prompt-level defenses. To ensure reproducibility, each run automatically logs full prompts, agent event traces, session transcripts, and verdict records. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/AI-Infra-Guard/tree/main/Research/pikit.

Research area