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Large language models (LLMs) are now routinely used to autonomously execute complex tasks, from natural language processing to dynamic workflows like web searches. The usage of tool-calling and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) allows…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Dennis Rall , Bernhard Bauer , Mohit Mittal , Thomas Fraunholz

We demonstrate how AI-powered cybersecurity tools can be turned against themselves through prompt injection attacks. Prompt injection is reminiscent of cross-site scripting (XSS): malicious text is hidden within seemingly trusted content,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Víctor Mayoral-Vilches , Per Mannermaa Rynning

Autonomous UI agents powered by AI have tremendous potential to boost human productivity by automating routine tasks such as filing taxes and paying bills. However, a major challenge in unlocking their full potential is security, which is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ivan Evtimov , Arman Zharmagambetov , Aaron Grattafiori , Chuan Guo , Kamalika Chaudhuri

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled agents to move beyond conversation toward end-to-end task execution and become more helpful. However, this helpfulness introduces new security risks stem less from direct interface abuse than from…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Fengchao Chen , Tingmin Wu , Van Nguyen , Carsten Rudolph

With the fast development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-driven Web Agents (Web Agents for short) have obtained tons of attention due to their superior capability where LLMs serve as the core part of making decisions like the human…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Fangzhou Wu , Shutong Wu , Yulong Cao , Chaowei Xiao

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and decision-making by leveraging external tools. However, this tool-centric paradigm introduces a previously underexplored attack surface,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Kanghua Mo , Li Hu , Yucheng Long , Zhihao Li

Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) enable agents to communicate and share information, achieving strong performance on complex tasks. However, this communication also creates an attack surface where malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lingxi Zhang , Guangtao Zheng , Hanjie Chen

Large Language Model (LLM) based agents integrated into web browsers (often called agentic AI browsers) offer powerful automation of web tasks. However, they are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Avihay Cohen

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Tianjie Ju , Yiting Wang , Xinbei Ma , Pengzhou Cheng , Haodong Zhao , Yulong Wang , Lifeng Liu , Jian Xie , Zhuosheng Zhang , Gongshen Liu

AI agents, powered by large language models (LLMs), have transformed human-computer interactions by enabling seamless, natural, and context-aware communication. While these advancements offer immense utility, they also inherit and amplify…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Xuying Li , Zhuo Li , Yuji Kosuga , Yasuhiro Yoshida , Victor Bian

Vision-Language Model (VLM) based Web Agents represent a significant step towards automating complex tasks by simulating human-like interaction with websites. However, their deployment in uncontrolled web environments introduces significant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Haowei Wang , Junjie Wang , Xiaojun Jia , Rupeng Zhang , Mingyang Li , Zhe Liu , Yang Liu , Qing Wang

Deep-research agents, i.e., systems that rely on multi-agent pipelines to iteratively retrieve, synthesize, and cite Web content in order to produce structured reports, are rapidly replacing traditional search for both routine and complex…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Tingwei Zhang , Harold Triedman , Vitaly Shmatikov

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have established them as agentic systems capable of planning and interacting with various tools. These LLM agents are often paired with web-based tools, enabling access to diverse sources…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Hanna Kim , Minkyoo Song , Seung Ho Na , Seungwon Shin , Kimin Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in real-world decision-making tasks for embodied artificial intelligence, especially when fine-tuned to leverage their inherent common sense and reasoning abilities while being…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Ruochen Jiao , Shaoyuan Xie , Justin Yue , Takami Sato , Lixu Wang , Yixuan Wang , Qi Alfred Chen , Qi Zhu

A high volume of recent ML security literature focuses on attacks against aligned large language models (LLMs). These attacks may extract private information or coerce the model into producing harmful outputs. In real-world deployments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Ang Li , Yin Zhou , Vethavikashini Chithrra Raghuram , Tom Goldstein , Micah Goldblum

When AI agents retrieve and reason over external documents, adversaries can manipulate the data they receive to subvert their behaviour. Previous research has studied indirect prompt injection, where the attacker injects malicious…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Michael Schlichtkrull

The emergence of multimodal large language models has redefined the agent paradigm by integrating language and vision modalities with external data sources, enabling agents to better interpret human instructions and execute increasingly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Le Wang , Zonghao Ying , Tianyuan Zhang , Siyuan Liang , Shengshan Hu , Mingchuan Zhang , Aishan Liu , Xianglong Liu

Prompt injection attacks manipulate webpage content to cause web agents to execute attacker-specified tasks instead of the user's intended ones. Existing methods for detecting and localizing such attacks achieve limited effectiveness, as…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xilong Wang , Yinuo Liu , Zhun Wang , Dawn Song , Neil Gong

With the prosperity of large language models (LLMs), powerful LLM-based intelligent agents have been developed to provide customized services with a set of user-defined tools. State-of-the-art methods for constructing LLM agents adopt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Yifei Wang , Dizhan Xue , Shengjie Zhang , Shengsheng Qian

LLM-powered agents are beginning to automate user's tasks across the open web, often with access to user resources such as emails and calendars. Unlike standard LLMs answering questions in a controlled ChatBot setting, web agents act "in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jaechul Roh , Eugene Bagdasarian , Hamed Haddadi , Ali Shahin Shamsabadi