The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new privacy
challenges, particularly during inference where sensitive information in
prompts may be exposed to proprietary LLM APIs. In this paper, we address the
problem of formally protecting the sensitive information contained in a prompt
while maintaining response quality. To this end, first, we introduce a
cryptographically inspired notion of a prompt sanitizer which transforms an
input prompt to protect its sensitive tokens. Second, we propose
Pr$\epsilon\epsilon$mpt, a novel system that implements a prompt sanitizer.
Pr$\epsilon\epsilon$mpt categorizes sensitive tokens into two types: (1) those
where the LLM's response depends solely on the format (such as SSNs, credit
card numbers), for which we use format-preserving encryption (FPE); and (2)
those where the response depends on specific values, (such as age, salary) for
which we apply metric differential privacy (mDP). Our evaluation demonstrates
that Pr$\epsilon\epsilon$mpt is a practical method to achieve meaningful
privacy guarantees, while maintaining high utility compared to unsanitized
prompts, and outperforming prior methods