How to secure your entire LLM lifecycle

As more teams transition large language models (LLMs) from prototypes to production, a critical question arises: How do you secure the entire lifecycle of LLM usage?

It’s not enough to just secure the API key or sanitize a few outputs. The risks today span across every stage, from access control and prompt construction to model responses, tool use, and even data logging.

What’s needed is a layered approach, one that combines infrastructure-level control with real-time behavioral monitoring.

Securing access to the model

The first point of vulnerability in any LLM-powered system is how models are accessed. Without strict control, it’s easy for keys to leak, for rogue apps to spin up usage, or for internal teams to accidentally exceed quotas.

Portkey solves this by sitting between your application and the model provider, acting as a secure API gateway for all LLM traffic. It gives you complete control over:

• API key management: Issue virtual keys for each team, environment, or use case. Rotate keys without code changes.
• Usage policies: Set token limits, call frequency caps, and model-specific access controls.
• Request-level access control: Enforce org- or user-level policies dynamically with metadata or headers.

This means your LLM stack is no longer an open faucet. Access is tightly scoped, monitored, and enforced in real time.

Preventing malicious prompts and unsafe responses

Even if access is secured, what users send to the model — and what the model returns — can still pose significant security risks.

Attackers can craft prompts that bypass filters, manipulate the model into leaking sensitive data, or generate unsafe content. Worse, these attacks can be subtle and evolve, particularly in open-ended LLM use cases.

This is where Lasso and Portkey combine to enforce proactive and reactive defenses.

Lasso Security tackles these threats head-on. Its real-time detection engine, called Deputies, analyzes every prompt and response for behavioral anomalies. It detects:

• Crafted prompt injections
• Attempts to jailbreak or override model safety instructions
• Signs of sensitive data leakage

Beyond generic filters, Lasso enforces your organization’s specific security policies and monitors for harmful content like hate speech, sexual material, or illegal activity, ensuring your application meets both regulatory and reputational standards.

Portkey complements this by giving you proactive control at the gateway level. Its guardrails let you define prompt policies across any model or provider before the prompt ever reaches the LLM. But what makes Portkey especially powerful is the observability it layers on top. For every request, Portkey logs the guardrail decisions in detail: which checks passed, which failed, the verdicts returned, and even how long each check took. If a prompt was blocked or flagged, you know exactly why. If feedback was submitted, like user ratings or downstream output evaluations, you can see the score, weight, and metadata attached to that interaction.

Together, Lasso and Portkey’s AI Gateway give you a live, explainable layer of security across the full prompt lifecycle, adaptable to emerging threats and transparent enough to trust.

The value of an integrated LLM security stack

Most teams building with LLMs today are forced to stitch together their security posture — one tool to manage API keys, another for prompt filtering, a third to detect harmful outputs. The result is a fragmented system with gaps in coverage, duplicated logic, and operational blind spots.

By integrating Lasso and Portkey, you eliminate that complexity:

• Portkey secures the network layer, controlling how and when models are accessed and enforcing guardrails before prompts are ever processed.
• Lasso secures the model behavior layer, detecting threats in-flight, analyzing context, and flagging high-risk interactions in real time.

Together, they deliver true end-to-end visibility across every request, every prompt, and every response with no loss of control or speed.

This isn’t just about reducing tooling overhead. It’s about delivering consistent, enforceable security that scales. Portkey and Lasso are designed to work seamlessly, allowing you to:

• Enforce usage limits
• Define guardrails
• Detect unsafe behaviors
• Respond to threats in real time — all without rewriting your application logic

If you're building AI-powered experiences at scale, you shouldn't have to choose between flexibility and safety.

With Portkey and Lasso, you get both by design.