GenAI For Practitioners

Top 7 GenAI Security Tools to Safeguard Your AI’s Future

Deval Shah Deval Shah 15 min read Jul 24, 2024

Here is our evaluation of the top 7 GenAI security tools on the market today (Aug 2024), so you can pick what is best for your business:

Aporia – Best for providing end-to-end security for any GenAI application

Lakera Guard – Best for cyber security threats

Calypso AI – Best for governance of generative AI models

Lasso security – Best for contextual data protection (CDP)

WhyLabs – Best for continuous monitoring

Protect AI – Best for easy customization

LLM Guard – Best for its cost-effective CPU inference

Top 7 GenAI Security Tools Comparison Table

Here is what makes each security tool unique in its own way, so you can find the best one for your business.

 Best ForKey features
AporiaProviding end-to-end security for any GenAI application* Security guardrails (prompt injections, data leakage, and more)
* Reliability guardrails
* Real-time issue resolution
* Lightning-fast latency
* Multimodal support
Lakera GuardCyber security threats* Prompt injection prevention
* Data leakage prevention
* Red teaming simulations
Calypso AIGovernance of generative AI models* Generative AI security scanner
* Generative AI governance tool
* Compliance and cost management
Lasso securityContextual data protection (CDP)* Contextual data protection
* Real-time detection and alerting
* Seamless integration
WhyLabs Continuous monitoring* Real-time security guardrails
* Continuous monitoring
* Integrative compatibility
Protect AIEasy customization* AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM)
* Enterprise-level scanning
* End-to-end security monitoring
LLM GuardIt’s cost-effective CPU inference* Built-in sanitization and redaction
* Data leakage prevention
* Prompt injection resistance

Intro

Imagine a world where your marketing copy writes itself, your software code debugs independently, and customer service runs 24/7 without a single human agent. 

This isn’t science fiction—it’s the reality of generative AI (GenAI) in 2024. But this incredible capability comes with a hidden threat: a new breed of security issues that could cripple your business if you’re not prepared.

As organizations increasingly integrate GenAI into their systems, they become vulnerable to numerous novel threats, including data breaches, model poisoning attacks, and misinformation. 

According to IBM’s 2023 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index report, there was a 26% increase in AI-related security incidents in 2023, highlighting the growing concern around the potential misuse and exploitation of GenAI.

To navigate this new age of cybersecurity, businesses must adopt robust GenAI security tools. These tools are essential for safeguarding sensitive data, ensuring compliance, and maintaining trust in AI-driven processes. 

We will explore the top GenAI security tools available in 2024, covering how to protect your organization from emerging threats. Moreover, we will also delve into the history of GenAI, its rapid penetration in the enterprise sector, and why GenAI security is crucial for modern cybersecurity strategies.

A Brief History of GenAI and Its Sudden Adoption

The journey of generative AI (GenAI) began in the 1950s with rule-based systems designed to generate patterns. These early models laid the groundwork for future advancements by demonstrating the potential of algorithms to create new data. By the 1980s, neural networks started gaining traction, with pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton developing techniques such as Boltzmann Machines to generate data through interconnected nodes.

The true turning point for GenAI came in the 2010s with the advent of deep learning and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), introduced by Ian Goodfellow in 2014.

This innovation, advancements in deep learning, and increased computational power propelled GenAI into the mainstream. The exponential growth in data availability and the development of more sophisticated algorithms further accelerated GenAI’s capabilities, enabling it to produce high-quality outputs across various modalities.

There is no debate around the fact that ChatGPT significantly heightened awareness of GenAI’s capabilities. According to a Gartner poll, 45% of executive leaders reported that ChatGPT’s attention prompted them to increase their investments in AI technologies. This surge in interest has led to more organizations exploring and integrating GenAI solutions into their operations.

The adoption of generative AI (GenAI) has surged dramatically in recent years, transforming both enterprise and consumer-facing products. According to a 2023 survey by PwC, 73% of U.S. companies have integrated AI into various aspects of their business, with over half (54%) specifically implementing GenAI solutions.

The widespread adoption of GenAI underscores its potential to reshape the business landscape, making it an indispensable tool for modern enterprises.

Why GenAI Security is the New Age of Cybersecurity

In 2024, cybersecurity emerges as a particularly compelling theme, driven by two key factors. Firstly, the ever-evolving threat landscape necessitates that organizations maintain heightened vigilance and sustained investment in security measures. This dynamic environment ensures cybersecurity remains a critical priority for businesses across sectors.

The rising prominence of generative AI presents challenges and opportunities in cybersecurity. This rapid AI adoption is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it empowers malicious actors to uncover vulnerabilities and refine their attack methodologies with unprecedented sophistication. 

Let’s look at known GenAI security issues and their potential consequences.

Model Poisoning Attacks

Adversaries can corrupt the training data or the model itself, leading to compromised outputs that can be malicious or misleading.

Example: Instruction Tuning Manipulation

A recent paper, `Learning to Poison Large Language Models During Instruction Tuning, illustrated a novel data poisoning attack during the instruction tuning of LLMs, where adversaries inserted backdoor triggers into training data. This manipulation led to compromised model outputs for specific queries. 

For instance, poisoning just 1% of the instruction tuning samples resulted in a performance drop rate of around 80% in various tasks. This highlights the vulnerability of LLMs to subtle yet impactful data poisoning attacks.

Instruction Tuning Manipulation

Adversarial Attacks

Adversarial Attacks involve minor alterations of inputs to deceive the AI into making incorrect decisions, which can have serious implications in critical applications like healthcare or autonomous driving.

Example: Manipulating Outputs with Adversarial Prompts

Adversarial attacks on LLMs involve crafting inputs that trigger the model to produce undesired or harmful outputs. For example, researchers have demonstrated that subtly altering the input text could manipulate a language model to output unsafe content or leak private information. These attacks are particularly challenging because they exploit the model’s inherent weaknesses in handling unexpected inputs. Such attacks can have severe implications in critical applications like healthcare, where incorrect decisions can jeopardize patient safety.

Adversarial Attacks

GenAI models can inadvertently perpetuate or even amplify existing biases present in the training data, leading to unfair or unethical outcomes.

Traditional cybersecurity frameworks primarily focus on protecting data and network integrity but fail to address these AI-specific vulnerabilities. The dynamic and self-learning nature of GenAI systems necessitates a new approach to security that includes continuous monitoring and real-time intervention.

Example: Bias in Hate Speech Detection

One prominent example of bias in LLMs is Google’s hate-speech detection algorithm, Perspective. The model exhibited bias against black American speech patterns, flagging common slang used by this community as toxic. This bias arose because the training data lacked sufficient examples of the linguistic patterns typical of black American speech, leading to unfair and discriminatory outcomes. 

This incident underscores the importance of diverse and representative training data to mitigate bias in AI systems.

Racial bias observed in hate speech detection algorithm from Google

Consequences

The consequences of GenAI security breaches can be severe and far-reaching:

  • Financial Losses: Businesses can incur substantial financial losses due to data breaches, intellectual property theft, and operational disruptions. According to IBM, the average data breach cost in 2023 was $4.45 million, which can be significantly higher for AI-related incidents.
  • Reputational Damage: Security breaches can erode customer trust and damage a company’s reputation. In an era where data privacy is paramount, any lapse in AI security can lead to a loss of consumer confidence and long-term brand damage.
  • Societal Harm: GenAI security breaches can have broader societal implications beyond financial and reputational impacts. For instance, biased or manipulated AI outputs can perpetuate misinformation, discrimination, and other social harms.

Let’s uncover some of the best GenAI security tools available for seamless integration in your systems today.

Top 7 GenAI Security Tools

1. Aporia

aporia

Aporia’s leading platform is designed to ensure AI systems’ security, reliability, and ethical compliance. Founded in 2019 by Liran Hason and Alon Gubkin, Aporia has quickly established itself as a leader in AI security and is trusted by Fortune 500s globally.

The Aporia platform provides real-time Guardrails to mitigate risks such as hallucinations, data leakage, and company compliance violations, ensuring AI applications perform reliably and securely across various modalities, including text, and audio.

Core Features

  • Security Guardrails: Aporia offers advanced security features to detect and block prompt injections, prompt leakage, SQL enforcement violations, and data leakage. It also ensures compliance with company policies and prevents personally identifiable information (PII) exposure.
  • Reliability Guardrails: The platform includes tools to detect and override responses containing profanity, off-topic discussions, and hallucinations. Custom policies can be created to align with specific brand values and operational needs.
  • Real-time Issue Resolution: Aporia supports real-time streaming and issue resolution, allowing immediate action and user warnings if a policy violation occurs. This ensures a seamless user experience while maintaining security and compliance.
  • Lightning-Fast Latency: Adding a layer of security doesn’t come without privacy concerns for engineers. Aporia’s 2024 benchmark report boasts latencies that outperform GPT-4o and Nvidia/NeMo Guardrails, an achievement reached thanks to their multiSLM Detection Engine.
  • Multimodal Support: The platform is optimized for various AI applications, providing guardrails for text and audio, with images and video support coming soon, making it versatile for different AI use cases.

Aporia integrates seamlessly with popular AI models and systems, including GPT-X and Claude, and offers extensive customization options to tailor the tool to specific business needs. It supports integration with AI gateways like Portkey, Litellm, and Cloudflare, ensuring broad compatibility and ease of deployment.

Aporia stands out as a comprehensive solution for AI observability and security, providing robust features to ensure AI systems are secure, reliable, and compliant. Its real-time capabilities and extensive customization options make it a valuable tool for businesses aiming to deploy trustworthy AI applications.

2. Lakera Guard

Lakera

Lakera Guard is an AI-powered threat intelligence software developed by Zurich-based AI security firm Lakera. Launched in 2021, Lakera Guard is designed to protect generative AI applications from various cyber threats, including prompt injections, data leakage, and other vulnerabilities. 

Lakera Guard focuses on securing large language models (LLMs) integral to applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, and data analysis tools.

Core Features

  • Prompt Injection Protection: Lakera Guard detects and addresses prompt injections in real time, preventing malicious prompts from compromising AI applications. This feature is crucial for maintaining the integrity and security of LLMs.
  • Data Leakage Prevention: The platform safeguards sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) and ensures compliance with privacy regulations, protecting organizations from costly data breaches.
  • Red Teaming Simulations: Lakera Guard conducts red teaming simulations to identify and mitigate potential attacks before and after LLM deployment. This proactive approach helps stress-test AI systems to ensure their robustness.

Lakera Guard is popular for its robust feature set and low latency solutions to secure LLMs.

3. CalypsoAI

CalypsoAI

CalypsoAI is a AI security platform founded in 2018, specializing in the protection and governance of generative AI models. The platform is designed to provide robust, scalable, and model-agnostic security solutions, ensuring the safe deployment and operation of large language models (LLMs) across various industries.

Core Features

  • Generative AI Security Scanner: This customizable tool allows organizations to design AI-powered scanners tailored to specific vulnerabilities and threats. Users can set detailed policies, block or redact selected content categories, and create new categories based on proprietary data.
  • Generative AI Governance Tool: CalypsoAI’s flagship feature actively monitors the real-time usage of LLMs, providing full audit traceability, and attribution for costs, content, and user engagement. It ensures that AI outputs are truthful and prevents sharing sensitive company information.
  • Compliance and Cost Management: CalypsoAI provides solutions to ensure compliance with regulatory standards and includes features for effective cost management, helping organizations stay on budget for AI projects.

CalypsoAI stands out as a comprehensive AI security and governance solution, offering advanced features to protect against AI-specific threats.

4. Lasso Security

lasso

Lasso Security, founded in 2023, specializes in cybersecurity for large language models (LLMs) within the generative artificial intelligence domain. The company offers a suite of security solutions designed to protect organizations from external cyber threats and internal vulnerabilities associated with using LLMs.

Core Features

  • Contextual Data Protection (CDP): Lasso Security’s custom policy wizard allows users to create data protection policies using plain language, eliminating the need for complex coding. This tool adjusts to evolving data environments, ensuring continuous protection against emerging threats.
  • Real-time Detection and Alerting: The platform includes robust real-time detection and alerting systems monitoring every LLM data transfer interaction. This feature swiftly identifies anomalies or policy violations, maintaining a secure and compliant environment.
  • Seamless Integration: The platform integrates effortlessly with existing systems, including browser extensions and secured gateways, minimizing disruptions to workflow processes. It supports various AI models and stacks, ensuring broad compatibility and ease of deployment.

Lasso Security offers important features to protect against various AI-specific threats.

5. WhyLabs

why labs

WhyLabs is an LLM security platform established in 2019, focusing on securing large language models (LLMs) against various cyber threats, including data leakage, prompt injections, and misuse. Recognized as a leader in AI observability and security, WhyLabs is trusted across sectors such as healthcare, finance, and e-commerce for its robust capabilities.

Core Features

  • Real-time Security Guardrails: WhyLabs provides exceptional protection by identifying and mitigating risks in real-time through AI oversight mechanisms, preventing hallucinations, inappropriate content generation, and blocking toxic responses.
  • Continuous Monitoring: The platform monitors model performance continuously to address issues like data drift and model degradation, ensuring consistent application reliability.
  • Integrative Compatibility: The platform is LLM-agnostic and integrates seamlessly with major AI frameworks and models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and custom models, allowing for flexible and immediate deployment in existing architectures.

WhyLabs LLM Security is a crucial integration in securing AI applications, providing the necessary tools for organizations to deploy reliable, trustworthy LLMs with built-in safeguards against various security threats.

6. Protect AI

Protect AI

Protect AI, founded in 2022 by Ian Swanson, Daryan Dehghanpisheh, and Badar Ahmed, is a comprehensive platform designed to secure AI and machine learning (ML) systems. The company focuses on addressing unique security challenges associated with AI/ML applications, offering tools to detect, manage, and mitigate risks throughout the AI lifecycle. 

Core Features

  • Radar: This AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) tool provides end-to-end visibility and management of security threats across AI/ML systems. It offers comprehensive security scans, contextualized insights, and AI risk standardization, empowering teams to detect and respond to risks efficiently.
  • Guardian: Guardian enables enterprise-level scanning, enforcement, and management of model security. It continuously scans third-party and proprietary models for security threats, ensuring a secure ML supply chain.
  • Layer: Layer offers end-to-end security monitoring and observability for generative AI, providing actionable intelligence to prevent data leakage, adversarial prompt injection attacks, and integrity breaches.

Protect AI offers comprehensive tools, seamless integration, and customization options for organizations aiming to deploy secure and reliable AI applications.

7. LLM Guard

llm guard

LLM Guard is a comprehensive security toolkit designed to fortify the security of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary purpose of LLM Guard is to ensure safe and secure interactions with LLMs by offering features such as sanitization, detection of harmful language, prevention of data leakage, and resistance against prompt injection attacks. 

The tool is recognized for its robust security measures and cost-effective CPU inference, offering a substantial cost reduction with 5x lower inference expenses on CPU compared to GPU. LLM Guard supports various AI applications, including text, images, audio, and video, ensuring broad applicability across different use cases.

Core Features

  • Sanitization and Redaction: LLM Guard provides built-in sanitization to clean prompts and responses, ensuring that harmful language is detected and redacted in real time. This feature is essential for maintaining the integrity and safety of AI interactions.
  • Data Leakage Prevention: The platform includes advanced scanners to prevent data leakage, protecting sensitive information from being exposed during AI operations.
  • Prompt Injection Resistance: LLM Guard is engineered to resist prompt injection attacks, safeguarding the AI models from malicious inputs that could compromise functionality.

LLM Guard is vital for securing LLM applications, providing advanced features such as seamless integration and cost-effective CPU inference.

Conclusion

As we conclude this exploration of GenAI security in 2024, it is evident that the rapid adoption of GenAI has transformed the business landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation and growth. 

However, this progress also brings new security challenges that demand robust solutions. By prioritizing security, organizations can harness the full potential of GenAI while mitigating the risks and ensuring a safe and trustworthy AI ecosystem. 

As the GenAI landscape continues to evolve, ongoing vigilance and adaptation will be essential to maintaining security in this new age of technology.

FAQ

What are the main risks associated with GenAI?

GenAI risks include model poisoning, adversarial attacks, bias, data leakage, and prompt injections.

Why is GenAI security important?

GenAI security safeguards sensitive data, ensures compliance, and maintains trust in AI-driven processes.

How does Aporia prevent hallucinations in AI outputs?

Aporia uses a combination of statistical analysis, anomaly detection, and custom policies to identify and override responses that deviate from expected patterns or contain factual errors.

How does GenAI impact the cybersecurity landscape?

GenAI presents new threats but also provides tools for enhanced defense and threat detection.

What are the consequences of GenAI security breaches?

Consequences include financial losses, reputational damage, and societal harm.

References

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  12.  https://www.lasso.security
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  21.  https://github.com/corca-ai/awesome-llm-security

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