CausalArmor: Efficient Indirect Prompt Injection Guardrails via Causal Attribution

Abstract

AI agents equipped with tool-calling capabilities are susceptible to *Indirect Prompt Injection* (IPI) attacks. In this attack scenario, malicious commands hidden within *untrusted* content trick the agent into performing unauthorized actions. Existing defenses can reduce attack success but often suffer from the ***over-defense dilemma***: they deploy expensive, *always-on* sanitization regardless of actual threat, thereby degrading utility and latency even in benign scenarios. We revisit IPI through a causal ablation perspective: a successful injection manifests as a *dominance shift* where the user request no longer provides decisive support for the agent's privileged action, while a particular untrusted segment, such as a retrieved document or tool output, provides disproportionate attributable influence. Based on this signature, we propose **CausalArmor**, a selective defense framework that (i) computes lightweight, leave-one-out ablation-based attributions at privileged decision points, and (ii) triggers targeted sanitization only when an untrusted segment dominates the user intent. Additionally, CausalArmor employs *retroactive Chain-of-Thought masking* to prevent the agent from acting on ``poisoned" reasoning traces. We present a theoretical analysis showing that sanitization based on attribution margins conditionally yields an exponentially small upper bound on the probability of selecting malicious actions. Experiments on AgentDojo and DoomArena demonstrate that CausalArmor matches the security of aggressive defenses while improving explainability and preserving utility and latency of AI agents.