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Large Language Model (LLM) agents remain vulnerable to safety threats from the external environment, where attackers inject adversarial content into external observations such as tool-returned data, webpages, or MCP context, causing harmful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yongxiang Li , Moxin Li , Zhixin Ma , Fengbin Zhu , Dongrui Liu , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng

Third-party skills are becoming the package ecosystem for LLM agents. They package natural-language instructions, helper scripts, templates, documents, and service configuration into reusable workflows. This makes skills useful, but it also…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Haomin Zhuang , Hanwen Xing , Yujun Zhou , Yuchen Ma , Yue Huang , Yili Shen , Yufei Han , Xiangliang Zhang

The emergence of autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents capable of tool usage has introduced new safety risks that go beyond traditional conversational misuse. These agents, empowered to execute external functions, are vulnerable to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Zeyang Sha , Hanling Tian , Zhuoer Xu , Shiwen Cui , Changhua Meng , Weiqiang Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results on natural language tasks, and security researchers are beginning to employ them in both offensive and defensive systems. In cyber-security, there have been multiple research…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Jiacen Xu , Jack W. Stokes , Geoff McDonald , Xuesong Bai , David Marshall , Siyue Wang , Adith Swaminathan , Zhou Li

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly proficient at solving web-based tasks. With this capability comes a greater risk of misuse for malicious purposes, such as posting misinformation in an online forum or selling illicit substances on…

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong decision-making abilities in screen-based interaction tasks. However, they remain highly vulnerable to pop-up-based…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zihe Yan , Jiaping Gui , Zhuosheng Zhang , Gongshen Liu

With the proliferation of LLM-driven multi-agent systems (MAS), the security of Web links has become a critical concern. Once MAS is induced to trust a malicious link, attackers can use it as a springboard to expand the attack surface. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Dezhang Kong , Hujin Peng , Yilun Zhang , Lele Zhao , Zhenhua Xu , Shi Lin , Changting Lin , Meng Han

As LLMs are increasingly integrated into systems that browse, retrieve, summarize, and act on web content, webpages have become an untrusted input vector for downstream model behavior. This enables site owners, contributors, and adversaries…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Soheil Khodayari , Xuenan Zhang , Bhupendra Acharya , Giancarlo Pellegrino

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are rapidly improving to handle increasingly complex web-based tasks. Most of these agents rely on general-purpose, proprietary models like GPT-4 and focus on designing better prompts to improve their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Junhong Shen , Atishay Jain , Zedian Xiao , Ishan Amlekar , Mouad Hadji , Aaron Podolny , Ameet Talwalkar

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) empower autonomous mobile agents, yet their security under realistic mobile deployment constraints remains underexplored. While agents are vulnerable to visual prompt injections, stealthily executing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Renhua Ding , Xiao Yang , Zhengwei Fang , Jun Luo , Kun He , Jun Zhu

Despite the potential of language model-based agents to solve real-world tasks such as web navigation, current methods still struggle with long-horizon tasks with complex action trajectories. In contrast, humans can flexibly solve complex…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Zora Zhiruo Wang , Jiayuan Mao , Daniel Fried , Graham Neubig

Web agents have emerged as an effective paradigm for automating interactions with complex web environments, yet remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that embed malicious instructions into webpage content to induce unintended…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Mengyao Du , Han Fang , Haokai Ma , Jiahao Chen , Kai Xu , Quanjun Yin , Ee-Chien Chang

Recent advances in browser-based LLM agents have shown promise for automating tasks ranging from simple form filling to hotel booking or online shopping. Current benchmarks measure agent performance in controlled environments, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Su Kara , Fazle Faisal , Suman Nath

Large Language Model (LLM) web agents often struggle with long-horizon web navigation and web task completion in new websites, producing inefficient action sequences unless fine-tuned on environment-specific data. We show that…

LLM agents have demonstrated remarkable performance across various applications, primarily due to their advanced capabilities in reasoning, utilizing external knowledge and tools, calling APIs, and executing actions to interact with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Zhaorun Chen , Zhen Xiang , Chaowei Xiao , Dawn Song , Bo Li

Web agents, which couple language models with browsing and tool-use capabilities, show promise as open web assistants. Yet progress is increasingly limited by the lack of scalable, process-level supervision. Existing benchmarks are largely…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tenghao Huang , Kung-Hsiang Huang , Prafulla Kumar Choubey , Yilun Zhou , Muhao Chen , Jonathan May , Chien-Sheng Wu

Although LLM-based agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), can use external tools and memory mechanisms to solve complex real-world tasks, they may also introduce critical security vulnerabilities. However, the existing literature…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hanrong Zhang , Jingyuan Huang , Kai Mei , Yifei Yao , Zhenting Wang , Chenlu Zhan , Hongwei Wang , Yongfeng Zhang

Autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire external functionalities through third-party skills available in open marketplaces. Adopting these integrations broadens the potential attack surface, prompting a need for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Xinyu Liu , Yukai Zhao , Xing Hu , Xin Xia

Jailbreak attacks on Language Model Models (LLMs) entail crafting prompts aimed at exploiting the models to generate malicious content. Existing jailbreak attacks can successfully deceive the LLMs, however they cannot deceive the human.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Zhilong Wang , Yebo Cao , Peng Liu

As language models (LMs) are used to build autonomous agents in real environments, ensuring their adversarial robustness becomes a critical challenge. Unlike chatbots, agents are compound systems with multiple components taking actions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Chen Henry Wu , Rishi Shah , Jing Yu Koh , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Daniel Fried , Aditi Raghunathan