DYNASHIELD: A Black-Box Moving Target Defense for LLMs via Dynamic Decoding Customization

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in which adversarial prompts induce harmful outputs. Existing defenses often require access to the model internals or additional training, limiting their applicability for service providers deployed through black-box APIs. In this paper, we propose DYNASHIELD, a moving target defense framework that improves robustness by customizing decoding hyperparameters and system prompts at inference time. DYNASHIELD includes two key steps: (1) it identifies decoding configurations that reduce attack success probability, and (2) it probabilistically samples from a weighted configuration pool to introduce controlled variability in model behavior. We evaluate DYNASHIELD across 7 open-source LLMs under 4 state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks, using adversarial prompts from AdvBench. Results show substantial reductions in attack success rate compared with 7 baseline defenses, while maintaining response quality and incurring minimal inference overhead. Because DYNASHIELD operates solely through exposed runtime controls, it requires no retraining or model-internal access. These results suggest that safety-aware dynamic decoding is a promising and practically lightweight defense mechanism for black-box LLM deployments.