CorrectGuard: Eyes-Off Correctness Estimation for Black-Box Security Guardrails

Abstract

AI services increasingly rely on black-box security guardrails, yet privacy-preserving model auditing regimes often cannot measure how well these systems perform in both a human eyes-off production setting, which disallows human inspection of user input, and a machine eyes-off setting, which disallows model inspection of such input. We introduce CorrectGuard, an eyes-off correctness estimation framework for both settings, which involves an independent model-based evaluator predicting whether guardrail decisions on human- and machine-inaccessible inputs are correct using only labeled eyes-on data and without access to the guardrail's internals. We evaluate in-context learning, embedding, and finetuning-based correctness models under leave-one-dataset-out evaluation across 13 safety and security datasets spanning harmful content, jailbreaks, prompt injection, and extraction, and across open-weight guardrails treated uniformly as black boxes. Across both human and machine eyes-off settings (the latter implemented using privacy-preserving fingerprinting of inputs), in-context-learning-based correctness classifiers substantially improve error identification across guardrails, achieving up to a 25 percentage-point increase in macro accuracy, as do finetuning-based approaches which provide a nearly 15-point boost, although performance varies sharply across guardrails and held-out datasets. Correctness scores also support guardrail decision ranking and abstention: across 3 guardrails, the best correctness rankings reduce AURC from unranked baselines of 0.33-0.44 to 0.17-0.22, while the best operating points retain 37.5-52.0% of guardrail decisions at 15% observed risk. These results show that external correctness models can expose systematic failures and support guardrail decision abstention without privileged access to the guardrail.