Application layer Vulnerabilities

Web-facing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) and retrieval poisoning via web-native markup and Unicode carriers. Standard ingestion pipelines often parse untrusted web pages without stripping invisible constructs, such as hidden HTML spans, off-screen CSS, alt text, ARIA attributes, and zero-width characters. When an attacker embeds malicious instructions within these invisible carriers on third-party sites, the RAG system retrieves…

Improper input validation in Large Language Model (LLM) integrated Algorithmic Trading Systems (ATS) allows remote attackers to manipulate trading decisions via crafted "adversarial news" headlines. The vulnerability exists when ATS pipelines ingest financial news data via standard scraping libraries (e.g., Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, Cheerio) and pass raw HTML or non-normalized text directly to LLMs (such as FinBERT, FinGPT, or GPT-4) for entity recognition (stock-name association) and sentiment…

LLM-based autonomous agents deployed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) false positive filtering exhibit a critical failure mode resulting in the suppression of True Positive (TP) vulnerability reports. When configured to triage alerts from tools such as CodeQL, Semgrep, and SonarQube, agents including SWE-agent, OpenHands, and Aider incorrectly classify legitimate, exploitable vulnerabilities as false positives. This vulnerability suppression is highly correlated with specific…

LLM-based autonomous agents are vulnerable to implicit regulatory compliance failures during tool invocation. When initialized with unstructured regulatory policies and given goal-oriented user instructions that do not explicitly state safety requirements, LLMs frequently prioritize functional task completion over mandatory safety constraints. This leads to an "Unsafe Success" execution state, where the agent successfully achieves the user's business goal but silently bypasses critical…

LLM-as-a-Reviewer systems, which utilize large language models to automate the peer review process, are vulnerable to the Paraphrasing Adversarial Attack (PAA). PAA is a black-box optimization technique that exploits the model's sensitivity to specific input sequences and self-preference bias. By iteratively paraphrasing specific manuscript sections (such as the abstract) using in-context learning (ICL) guided by previous review scores, an attacker can generate adversarial sequences that…

LLM routing systems are vulnerable to adversarial rerouting attacks where malicious triggers prepended to user queries manipulate the router's model-selection mechanism. Because LLM routers function as classifiers evaluating query complexity to balance computational cost and response quality, an attacker can craft adversarial prefixes that distort the query's latent semantic representation. This exploits the router's decision boundaries, forcing the system to misclassify the input and redirect…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification v1.0 contains fundamental architectural vulnerabilities enabling server-side prompt injection and privilege escalation. The protocol relies on bidirectional sampling (sampling/createMessage) without cryptographic origin authentication or UI distinction, allowing connected servers to inject content that the LLM backend interprets as legitimate user input. Additionally, the protocol lacks isolation boundaries between concurrent server connections…

AutoArgue, an LLM-based evaluation framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, is susceptible to evaluation subversion attacks due to the public availability of its judging prompts and reference data structures. An adversarial RAG system (exemplified by the "Crucible" probe) can incorporate "insider knowledge" of the evaluation logic directly into its generation pipeline. By wrapping the generation process with the evaluator's specific prompts, the system can pre-filter…

The Google Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), specifically within the reference implementation built using the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Gemini models, contains vulnerabilities allowing for both indirect and direct prompt injection. The architecture fails to sufficiently isolate the Large Language Model (LLM) context from untrusted external data sources and user inputs.

Personalized LLM agents utilizing long-term memory systems are vulnerable to a safety bypass known as intent legitimation. Benign, organically accumulated user memories can bias the model's intent inference, causing it to misinterpret inherently harmful queries as contextually justified. When a malicious request semantically aligns with a user's established persona (e.g., hobbies, mental health history, routine), the model normalizes the request and complies, effectively bypassing standard…