Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Large Language Models (LLMs),
where adversaries can embed hidden triggers to manipulate LLM's outputs. Most
existing defense methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, are
ineffective against the autoregressive nature and vast output space of LLMs,
thereby suffering from poor performance and high latency. To address these
limitations, we investigate the behavioral discrepancies between benign and
backdoored LLMs in output space. We identify a critical phenomenon which we
term sequence lock: a backdoored model generates the target sequence with
abnormally high and consistent confidence compared to benign generation.
Building on this insight, we propose ConfGuard, a lightweight and effective
detection method that monitors a sliding window of token confidences to
identify sequence lock. Extensive experiments demonstrate ConfGuard achieves a
near 100\% true positive rate (TPR) and a negligible false positive rate (FPR)
in the vast majority of cases. Crucially, the ConfGuard enables real-time
detection almost without additional latency, making it a practical backdoor
defense for real-world LLM deployments.