CivicShield: A Cross-Domain Defense-in-Depth Framework for Securing Government-Facing AI Chatbots Against Multi-Turn Adversarial Attacks

TL;DR

CivicShield is a comprehensive, layered defense framework designed to protect government AI chatbots from multi-turn adversarial attacks, combining formal verification, anomaly detection, and human oversight.

Contribution

The paper introduces CivicShield, a novel multi-layer defense-in-depth framework integrating diverse security principles to significantly improve chatbot robustness against complex attacks.

Findings

Layered defenses reduce attack success probability by 10-100 times.

Simulation shows 72.9% detection rate with 2.9% false positives.

Framework maintains high detection of crescendo and drift attacks.

Abstract

LLM-based chatbots in government services face critical security gaps. Multi-turn adversarial attacks achieve over 90% success against current defenses, and single-layer guardrails are bypassed with similar rates. We present CivicShield, a cross-domain defense-in-depth framework for government-facing AI chatbots. Drawing on network security, formal verification, biological immune systems, aviation safety, and zero-trust cryptography, CivicShield introduces seven defense layers: (1) zero-trust foundation with capability-based access control, (2) perimeter input validation, (3) semantic firewall with intent classification, (4) conversation state machine with safety invariants, (5) behavioral anomaly detection, (6) multi-model consensus verification, and (7) graduated human-in-the-loop escalation. We present a formal threat model covering 8 multi-turn attack families, map the framework to NIST SP 800-53 controls across 14 families, and evaluate using ablation analysis. Theoretical analysis shows layered defenses reduce attack probability by 1-2 orders of magnitude versus single-layer approaches. Simulation against 1,436 scenarios including HarmBench (416), JailbreakBench (200), and XSTest (450) achieves 72.9% combined detection [69.5-76.0% CI] with 2.9% effective false positive rate after graduated response, while maintaining 100% detection of multi-turn crescendo and slow-drift attacks. The honest drop on real benchmarks versus author-generated scenarios (71.2% vs 76.7% on HarmBench, 47.0% vs 70.0% on JailbreakBench) validates independent evaluation importance. CivicShield addresses an open gap at the intersection of AI safety, government compliance, and practical deployment.