Nightfall AI introduces ‘Firewall for AI’ to enhance security in generative AI applications

Cloud data protection startup Nightfall AI today announced the release of Firewall for AI, a new product designed to safeguard generative artificial intelligence-based applications and data pipelines.

The service seeks to address the issues of sensitive data exposure and prompt injection. They’re two of the greatest risks facing companies that host public large language models or leverage public generative AI services from companies such as OpenAI and Google LLC. Nightfall’s Firewall for AI aims to address these concerns through comprehensive security, operational and content guardrails for AI models and applications.

Nightfall’s Firewall for AI acts as a client wrapper that protects company and customer interactions with generative AI-based applications and data pipelines. The service prevents sensitive data exposure to LLMs by scanning automation workflows and data pipelines to remove sensitive personally identifiable information, payment card information, personal health information and secrets. This also ensures compliance with standards such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Firewall for AI also protects against malicious attacks such as prompt injection. It does so by detecting malicious content and ensuring appropriate language use, code use, response relevancy and sentiment analysis. Firewall for AI further maintains data quality by extracting proprietary, malicious, toxic and irrelevant content from datasets.

“Traditional security solutions often fall short due to their reliance on simplistic regexes, heuristics or outdated open source models,” said Nightfall AI Chief Technology Officer Rohan Sathe. “Our Firewall for AI leverages our AI-native, enterprise-grade detection engine and fine-tuned DLP models to deliver unmatched accuracy, throughput and response times.”

Nightfall’s Firewall for AI integrates into existing workflows through application programming interfaces and software development kits seamlessly, allowing customers to continuously monitor their AI interactions and automatically detect and mitigate potential risks in real time.

The company is a venture capital-backed startup, having last raised $40 million in a Series B round in August 2022. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures Partners LLC, Venrock Associates L.P., Pear Venture Partners LLC and several individual investors, including “Antman” actor Paul Rudd.

Photo: Nightfall AI