About the Arena

What is this?

AI Red Team Arena is a prompt injection testing playground designed for AI security researchers. Each challenge presents a simulated AI persona with a hidden flag protected by layered defenses. Your goal: bypass those defenses using prompt injection techniques to extract the flag.

No real AI models are called during gameplay. All personas are simulated using rule-based defense engines, making the platform completely free to use with zero API costs. This also means the challenges are deterministic and reproducible - perfect for studying and cataloging injection techniques.

Challenge Design Philosophy

• Difficulty 1-2 (Beginner/Easy): Basic keyword filters and simple role injection detection. Good for learning the fundamentals.
• Difficulty 3 (Medium): Multiple overlapping defenses including hypothetical framing detection and context manipulation checks.
• Difficulty 4 (Hard): Extensive keyword blocking, encoding detection, output format filtering, and strict input length limits.
• Difficulty 5 (Expert): Maximum security with every known defense vector covered. Requires truly novel approaches.

Defense Layers

The simulated personas employ combinations of these defense mechanisms:

• Keyword Blocking: Filters messages containing specific sensitive terms
• Role Injection Detection: Catches attempts to override the AI's identity
• Prompt Leak Prevention: Blocks requests to reveal system prompts
• Hypothetical Framing Detection: Identifies fictional/hypothetical evasion attempts
• Context Manipulation Detection: Catches fabricated conversation history
• Encoding Attack Detection: Identifies base64, unicode tricks, and obfuscation
• Output Format Attack Detection: Blocks encoding-based data exfiltration
• Token Smuggling Detection: Catches zero-width characters and homoglyphs
• Multi-language Attack Detection: Identifies injection in other languages
• Input Length Limits: Constrains message length to limit attack surface
• Regex Pattern Analysis: Custom pattern matching for advanced attack signatures

Why This Exists

Prompt injection is one of the most significant unsolved problems in AI security. As AI systems are deployed in increasingly critical applications, understanding how they can be manipulated is essential for building safer systems.

This platform exists to:

• Provide a safe, legal environment for practicing offensive AI security techniques
• Help researchers catalog and systematize prompt injection methods
• Generate training data on attack patterns for building better defenses
• Build community around AI red teaming and security research

For Researchers & Hiring Managers

This platform demonstrates practical understanding of AI security concepts including prompt injection taxonomy, defense-in-depth architectures for LLM applications, input sanitization strategies, and the fundamental challenges of instruction hierarchy in language models.

The challenge engine simulates real-world defense patterns used in production AI systems, scaled across difficulty levels that mirror the progression from basic input filtering to sophisticated multi-layered security architectures.