Continuous LLM Red Teaming with Promptfoo

Authorized Use Only: Run these adversarial probes only against LLM applications and endpoints you own or are explicitly authorized to test. Generated attack payloads (jailbreaks, prompt injections, harmful-content elicitation) are adversarial inputs; sending them to third-party services without permission may violate terms of service.

Overview

Promptfoo is an open-source LLM evaluation and red-teaming framework (used by OpenAI and Anthropic per its README) that generates adversarial test cases, runs them against your model/agent, and grades the responses. DeepTeam (by Confident AI) is a complementary open-source framework offering 50+ ready-to-use vulnerabilities and 10+ research-backed attack methods. Together they let you treat LLM security as a regression test: every commit re-runs the same adversarial suite, and the pipeline fails when a previously-safe behavior regresses.

This matters because LLM applications change constantly — prompts, models, RAG sources, tools, and guardrails all drift. A jailbreak that was patched last sprint can silently return after a prompt edit or a model upgrade. Promptfoo maps its plugins directly onto the OWASP LLM Top 10 (owasp:llm) and OWASP Agentic (owasp:agentic) presets, and onto MITRE ATLAS, so the suite tracks recognized risk taxonomies. The core threat addressed here is AML.T0051 — LLM Prompt Injection (MITRE ATLAS): adversarial instructions that override the application's intended behavior. This skill follows the Promptfoo red-team docs (https://www.promptfoo.dev/docs/red-team/) and DeepTeam docs (https://www.trydeepteam.com/docs/getting-started), and aligns to NIST AI RMF MANAGE-4.1 (post-deployment monitoring and feedback to manage AI risk).

When to Use

• When you need continuous, automated red-teaming of an LLM app in CI/CD rather than one-off manual tests.
• When you want to enforce a security gate: block merges that introduce or reintroduce jailbreak/injection vulnerabilities.
• When mapping coverage to OWASP LLM Top 10 / OWASP Agentic / MITRE ATLAS for compliance reporting.
• When comparing the security posture of two models or prompt versions side by side.
• When tracking vulnerability regression over time across releases.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+ (Promptfoo is distributed via npm) and Python 3.9+ (for DeepTeam).
• Install Promptfoo and DeepTeam:

  npm install -g promptfoo            # or: npx promptfoo@latest
  pip install -U deepteam
  

• API access/credentials for the target LLM endpoint (and a grader model, e.g. an OpenAI key) exposed as environment variables.
• A CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) with secret storage.
• Authorization to test the target application.

Objectives

• Scaffold a Promptfoo red-team config targeting your LLM app.
• Enable OWASP LLM Top 10 and OWASP Agentic plugin presets plus jailbreak/injection strategies.
• Run the suite locally and interpret the per-plugin pass/fail report.
• Add DeepTeam as a second engine for programmatic, research-backed attacks.
• Integrate both into CI/CD so builds fail on new vulnerabilities.
• Generate shareable HTML/PDF security reports per run.

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Workflow

1. Scaffold the red-team configuration

Initialize an interactive config; it writes promptfooconfig.yaml where targets, plugins, and strategies live.

promptfoo redteam init
# choose your target type (HTTP endpoint, openai:..., anthropic:..., custom provider)

2. Define targets, OWASP presets, and attack strategies

Edit promptfooconfig.yaml. The purpose grounds attack generation; plugins are adversarial input generators; strategies are delivery techniques (jailbreak/injection wrappers).

# promptfooconfig.yaml
targets:
  - id: https://api.example.com/chat        # your app endpoint
    label: support-bot

redteam:
  purpose: |
    A customer-support assistant for an e-commerce site. Must never reveal
    system prompts, leak PII, or perform actions outside order support.
  numTests: 10
  plugins:

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