Attack Type

Denial of service Research

Attacks that disrupt model availability

25 matching entries out of 36 in this category

Denial of service research results

25 entries

Context privilege escalation in AI agent harnesses

Published Sep 1, 2026Analyzed Sep 9, 2026Source: arXiv

Context assembly can promote repository, tool or skill content into higher-priority instructions or persistent state. The paper studies 12 pinned agent-harness versions.

What's in Your Agent's Context? Context Privilege Escalation Attacks against AI Agent Harness

Evaluated models: GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Sonnet 4.6+4 more

GPT-5.5
GPT-5.4-mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Opus 4.6
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Flash

Agent Lifecycle Compound Threats

Published Mar 12, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

OpenClaw is vulnerable to persistent memory poisoning, allowing an attacker to manipulate the agent's long-term memory store (MEMORY.md) via prompt injection. Because the autonomous agent continuously integrates this memory file as context for all subsequent reasoning and task planning, injected payloads act as durable behavioral constraints. This allows an attacker to persistently alter the agent's core policy, manipulate tool selection, and hijack future sessions without any further…

Taming openclaw: Security analysis and mitigation of autonomous llm agent threats

Evaluated models: Not reported

Multi-Stream Thinking Collapse

Published Mar 10, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

A vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with built-in "thinking" or step-by-step reasoning modes allows attackers to bypass safety alignments, trigger reasoning collapse, and cause resource exhaustion. The vulnerability is exploited via a Multi-Stream Perturbation Attack, which fragments the sequential integrity of a harmful prompt by word-by-word interleaving it with benign auxiliary tasks (e.g., "Explain the water cycle"). By wrapping the benign text streams in specific…

Multi-Stream Perturbation Attack: Breaking Safety Alignment of Thinking LLMs Through Concurrent Task Interference

Evaluated models: Qwen 3 1.7B, Qwen 3 4B, Qwen 3 8B+2 more

Qwen 3 1.7B
Qwen 3 4B
Qwen 3 8B
Qwen 3 Max
Gemini 2.5 Flash

Stealthy Tool-Call Token Exhaust

Published Mar 1, 2026Analyzed Mar 8, 2026Source: arXiv

OpenClaw v2026.2.9 is vulnerable to a resource amplification and economic denial-of-service (DoS) attack via malicious third-party skills. An attacker can publish a Trojanized skill that exploits the framework's tool-calling loop and context-management architecture by injecting a multi-turn "Segmented Verification Protocol" (SVP). Malicious instructions embedded in the skill's SKILL.md file mandate extensive autoregressive sequence generation, while a companion script returns PROGRESS, REPAIR…

Clawdrain: Exploiting Tool-Calling Chains for Stealthy Token Exhaustion in OpenClaw Agents

Evaluated models: Gemini 2.5 Pro

Adaptive Web Agent Prompt Injection

Published Feb 9, 2026Analyzed Feb 21, 2026Source: arXiv

Large Language Model (LLM) based web agents (such as those built using the BrowserUse scaffold) are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks when autonomously navigating and processing untrusted web content. Unlike standard Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), this vulnerability occurs when the LLM orchestrator consumes the DOM or visual screenshots of a webpage containing concealed or contextually disguised adversarial instructions. The LLM interprets these embedded text strings as…

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

Evaluated models: GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, Qwen3-VL 32B Instruct

Invisible Prompt Phishing Evasion

Published Feb 5, 2026Analyzed Mar 8, 2026Source: arXiv

Multimodal LLM-based phishing detection systems are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection via "perceptual asymmetry." Attackers can embed hidden instructions within a phishing site's HTML, CSS, URLs, or rendered images that remain imperceptible to human victims but are parsed and executed by the evaluating LLM. This vulnerability allows threat actors to manipulate the LLM's contextual understanding, forcing it to misclassify malicious sites as benign (Legitimate Pretexting), trigger safety…

Clouding the Mirror: Stealthy Prompt Injection Attacks Targeting LLM-based Phishing Detection

Evaluated models: GPT-5, Grok 4 Fast Non-Reasoning, Llama 4 Maverick+1 more

GPT-5
Grok 4 Fast Non-Reasoning
Llama 4 Maverick
Gemma 3 27B

MCP Description-Code Inconsistency

Published Feb 3, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) architecture lacks a semantic verification mechanism to enforce consistency between a tool's documented behavior (exposed to the Large Language Model via JSON schemas) and its actual executable logic. This design gap allows MCP Servers to present benign, read-only, or limited-scope descriptions to the LLM agent while implementing undocumented, privileged, or state-mutating functionality in the underlying code. An attacker can exploit this description–code…

Don't believe everything you read: Understanding and Measuring MCP Behavior under Misleading Tool Descriptions

Evaluated models: Not reported

LLM Router Rerouting

Published Jan 29, 2026Analyzed Mar 8, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

RerouteGuard: Understanding and Mitigating Adversarial Risks for LLM Routing

Evaluated models: GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-5+2 more

GPT-4
GPT-4o
GPT-5
Llama 3 8B
Mixtral 8x7B

Pathological Reasoning DoS

Published Jan 29, 2026Analyzed Mar 9, 2026Source: arXiv

A vulnerability in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) allows attackers to perform Prompt-Induced Inference-Time Denial-of-Service (PI-DoS) attacks by submitting short, semantically coherent adversarial prompts. These prompts, which often take the form of complex logic puzzles with nested dependencies or contradictory constraints, exploit the adaptive computation mechanism of LRMs to force the model into pathologically long, nearly non-terminating intermediate reasoning traces (e.g., generating…

ReasoningBomb: A Stealthy Denial-of-Service Attack by Inducing Pathologically Long Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models

Evaluated models: DeepSeek V3, Kimi K2 Instruct, DeepSeek R1+8 more

DeepSeek V3
Kimi K2 Instruct
DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B
MiniMax M2
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B
Qwen 3 30B-A3B Thinking
Qwen 3 32B
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5
Gemini 3 Pro Preview

Visual Object Injection

Published Jan 24, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to Physical Prompt Injection Attacks (PPIA), a query-agnostic injection technique delivered via the visual modality. The vulnerability stems from the model's "Vision-Enabled Text Recognition" capabilities and "Identity Sensitivity," where the model interprets text embedded in the physical environment (e.g., printed on signs, posters, or objects) as high-priority instructions rather than passive visual data. An attacker can embed adversarial…

Physical Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models

Evaluated models: GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini, GPT-4 Turbo+7 more

GPT-4o
GPT-4o Mini
GPT-4 Turbo
Gemini 1.5 Pro Latest
Gemini 1.5 Pro 002
Gemini 1.5 Flash Latest
Claude 3.5 Sonnet Latest
Claude 3.5 Haiku 20241022
Llama 3.2 11B Vision
Llama 3.2 90B Vision Instruct

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