Chain-of-Authorization: Internalizing Authorization into Large Language Models via Reasoning Trajectories
This addresses security risks for deploying LLMs in AI systems by enabling dynamic authorization, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of LLMs lacking awareness of knowledge ownership and access boundaries, which risks data leakage and unauthorized access, by proposing the Chain-of-Authorization framework that internalizes authorization logic into LLMs, resulting in high rejection rates against unauthorized access while maintaining utility in authorized scenarios.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become core cognitive components in modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems, combining internal knowledge with external context to perform complex tasks. However, LLMs typically treat all accessible data indiscriminately, lacking inherent awareness of knowledge ownership and access boundaries. This deficiency heightens risks of sensitive data leakage and adversarial manipulation, potentially enabling unauthorized system access and severe security crises. Existing protection strategies rely on rigid, uniform defense that prevent dynamic authorization. Structural isolation methods faces scalability bottlenecks, while prompt guidance methods struggle with fine-grained permissions distinctions. Here, we propose the Chain-of-Authorization (CoA) framework, a secure training and reasoning paradigm that internalizes authorization logic into LLMs' core capabilities. Unlike passive external defneses, CoA restructures the model's information flow: it embeds permission context at input and requires generating explicit authorization reasoning trajectory that includes resource review, identity resolution, and decision-making stages before final response. Through supervised fine-tuning on data covering various authorization status, CoA integrates policy execution with task responses, making authorization a causal prerequisite for substantive responses. Extensive evaluations show that CoA not only maintains comparable utility in authorized scenarios but also overcomes the cognitive confusion when permissions mismatches. It exhibits high rejection rates against various unauthorized and adversarial access. This mechanism leverages LLMs' reasoning capability to perform dynamic authorization, using natural language understanding as a proactive security mechanism for deploying reliable LLMs in modern AI systems.