Attack Surface
Security research involving application interfaces and API implementations
113 matching entries out of 273 in this category
Untrusted document images can redirect vision-language agents across instruction and tool-authorization boundaries. Repeat-After-Me evaluates six victim models on constructed document tasks.
Source: arXiv
Self-evolving agent-skill systems may promote recurring, attacker-controlled execution records into persistent reusable instructions. The paper evaluates whether poisoned but task-plausible trajectories survive aggregation and appear in generated skill artifacts, using inert canary behaviors and two structurally different skill-evolution pipelines.
Source: arXiv
The paper describes GhostWriter, a reproducible two-phase attack against tool-using agents with persistent memory: untrusted email or calendar content is admitted into long-term memory, then later retrieved during a benign user task and treated as trusted context. In the authors’ controlled evaluation, this could steer subsequent agent actions despite the adversary lacking direct access to the agent, memory store, account, or later prompt. The paper reports an average 98% memory-injection rate…
Source: arXiv
The paper presents a concrete, reproducible security evaluation in which attacker-controlled instructions embedded in retrieved external content steer stateful, tool-calling LLM agents toward unauthorized actions. It adapts white-box GCG and black-box TAP to AgentDojo and evaluates single-task and task-universal attacks across 80 task pairs in four domains. The reported results show that semantic black-box optimization can discover functional prompt injections more effectively than…
Source: arXiv
The paper describes and evaluates a reproducible application-layer weakness in agents with persistent memory: untrusted external content can cross the memory-write boundary, be stored as trusted factual, experience, or procedural memory, and influence later sessions. It identifies four write channels—explicit writes, policy-driven writes, compaction, and experience-to-procedure synthesis—and six attack classes. For safe defensive testing, use MPBench’s two-phase structure in an isolated agent…
Source: arXiv
The paper presents a specific black-box indirect prompt-injection evaluation: attacker-controlled external content can cause a memory-enabled assistant or external memory manager to persist a fabricated user memory, which may later be retrieved in a separate session and steer responses or agent actions. The authors evaluate injection, retrieval, and conditional adversarial usage separately across synthetic document and future-session datasets. The released repository provides defensive…
Source: arXiv
LLM-based coding agents are vulnerable to Document-Driven Implicit Payload Execution (DDIPE) via supply-chain poisoning of third-party agent skills. Attackers can embed malicious logic directly into legitimate-looking code examples and configuration templates within skill documentation files (e.g., SKILL.md). Because coding agents ingest this metadata into their context windows and treat the documentation as an authoritative reference, the underlying LLM silently reproduces and executes the…
Source: arXiv
LLM-based personal agents are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) defense bypasses via declarative context reframing and implicit file provenance trust. Attackers can bypass agent safety filters by phrasing malicious instructions as declarative compliance alerts rather than imperative commands. Because agents are designed to report discrepancies as expected behavior, declarative framing bypasses intent-sensitive safety mechanisms. Additionally, attackers can exploit the agent's…
Source: arXiv
Autonomous LLM agents deployed in dynamic, multi-step tool-calling environments are highly vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injections (IPI) embedded in external content. Surface-level defensive prompts and monitoring mechanisms (such as Prompt Warning, the Sandwich Method, Spotlighting, Keyword Filtering, and LLM-as-a-Judge) consistently fail to prevent exploitation and occasionally exacerbate the vulnerability by introducing adversarial distraction. While compromised agents exhibit…
Source: arXiv
An implicit reasoning hijacking vulnerability exists in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLM-based agent frameworks. Attackers with write access to an agent's external memory or knowledge base can inject adversarially optimized malicious instances that trigger jailbreaks without requiring any modifications to the user's input prompt. The attack utilizes a shadow model to extract high-contribution subword tokens from anticipated benign user queries via log-probability changes and…
Source: arXiv