Introducing F5 AI Guardrails

Maintaining your security posture in the age of AI is one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity. Traditional measures fall short of the task: Web Application Firewalls are ineffective against prompt injections and jailbreak attacks; API Security can’t defend against attacks that comply with the API specs; and model guardrails are only partially effective, mainly due to slow adoption rates and slower reaction to new threats.

F5 AI Guardrails, the newest addition (together with F5 AI Red Team) to the ADSP platform (F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform), is a runtime security platform that protects AI applications, models, and data from threats like prompt injection, jailbreaks, and data leakage.

Unlike traditional security controls like WAF and API Security but in a conceptually similar way to the model guardrails, it operates at the inference layer to block malicious inputs and outputs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration and policy violations, while adapting to new threats faster than traditional model training methods.

F5 AI Guardrails can be delivered through the F5 SaaS platform or it can be self-hosted, either on public clouds using technologies such as EKS (AWS), AKS (Azure), GKE (Google) or on-prem, using Red Hat OpenShift.

F5 AI Guardrails sits in front of AI models, inspecting user prompts and AI-generated responses, applying predefined or custom security policies and either blocks malicious activities or logs them for review.

F5 AI Reference Architecture:

https://www.f5.com/resources/reference-architectures/ai-overview#architecture

As an introduction to F5 AI Guardrails, let’s have a quick look at some of it’s core capabilities, with the help of some short demos:

 

Runtime Protection

F5 AI Guardrails inspects AI interactions in real-time to stop attacks like prompt injection and jailbreaking before they cause harm.

 

Data Security

F5 AI Guardrails prevent sensitive data (PII, proprietary info) from being leaked or misused by AI models

 

Regulatory Compliance

F5 AI Guardrails helps meet standards like GDPR and HIPAA through auditing, logging, and policy enforcement.

 

Custom Guardrails

A more advanced use case, but one the F5 AI Guardrails handles with ease.

 

Conclusion

F5 AI Guardrails protects AI applications from threats like prompt injection and jailbreaks, detects and prevents data leakages, ensures regulatory compliance and quickly adapts as adversarial techniques evolve.

For a quick introduction to the companion AI security technology that was recently released on the F5 ADSP platform, F5 AI Red Team, please check out the following article.