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Autonomous AI agents powered by Large Language Models can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks, but their ability to autonomously retrieve information and run code introduces significant security risks. Existing approaches attempt to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Hongyi Lu , Nian Liu , Shuai Wang , Fengwei Zhang

Large foundation models are integrated into Computer Use Agents (CUAs), enabling autonomous interaction with operating systems through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform complex tasks. This autonomy introduces serious security…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Wenqi Zhang , Yulin Shen , Changyue Jiang , Jiarun Dai , Geng Hong , Xudong Pan

Tool-enabled AI agents are increasingly deployed in cloud-hosted environments and offered as services, where they perform side-effecting operations through privileged tools within execution environments. While such agents enable powerful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hardik Goel

LLM-powered computer-use agents (CUAs) are shifting users from direct manipulation to supervisory coordination. Existing oversight mechanisms, however, have largely been studied as isolated interface features, making broader oversight…

Recent Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), powered by multimodal large language models (LLMs), offer a promising direction for automating complex desktop workflows through natural language. However, most existing CUAs remain conceptual…

Agentic AI and Multi-Agent Systems are poised to dominate industry and society imminently. Powered by goal-driven autonomy, they represent a powerful form of generative AI, marking a transition from reactive content generation into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Brian Bowers , Smita Khapre , Jugal Kalita

Securing Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems requires addressing the complex cyber risks introduced by autonomous, decision-making, and adaptive behaviors. Agentic AI systems are increasingly deployed across industries,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Sunil Arora , John Hastings

Web applications are prime targets for cyberattacks as gateways to critical services and sensitive data. Traditional penetration testing is costly and expertise-intensive, making it difficult to scale with the growing web ecosystem. While…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Xiaoxue Ren , Penghao Jiang , Kaixin Li , Zhiyong Huang , Xiaoning Du , Jiaojiao Jiang , Zhenchang Xing , Jiamou Sun , Terry Yue Zhuo

Evolving AI systems increasingly deploy multi-agent architectures where autonomous agents collaborate, share information, and delegate tasks through developing protocols. This connectivity, while powerful, introduces novel security risks.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Gauri Sharma , Vidhi Kulkarni , Miles King , Ken Huang

The safety of autonomous AI agents is increasingly recognized as a critical open problem. As agents transition from passive text generators to active actors capable of executing shell commands, modifying files, calling APIs, and browsing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ashwin Aravind

AI agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external content or tool outputs cause unintended or harmful behavior. Inspired by the well-established concept of firewalls, we show…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Rishika Bhagwatkar , Kevin Kasa , Abhay Puri , Gabriel Huang , Irina Rish , Graham W. Taylor , Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham , Alexandre Lacoste

Autonomous AI agents extend large language models into full runtime systems that load skills, ingest external content, maintain memory, plan multi-step actions, and invoke privileged tools. In such systems, security failures rarely remain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yixiang Zhang , Xinhao Deng , Jiaqing Wu , Yue Xiao , Ke Xu , Qi Li

Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit significant vulnerability to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks. These attacks hijack agent behavior by polluting external information sources, exploiting fundamental trade-offs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zhibo Liang , Tianze Hu , Zaiye Chen , Mingjie Tang

Computer-use agents (CUAs) that interact with real computer systems can perform automated tasks but face critical safety risks. Ambiguous instructions may trigger harmful actions, and adversarial users can manipulate tool execution to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tianyu Chen , Chujia Hu , Ge Gao , Dongrui Liu , Xia Hu , Wenjie Wang

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

AI agents have been boosted by large language models. AI agents can function as intelligent assistants and complete tasks on behalf of their users with access to tools and the ability to execute commands in their environments. Through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Yifeng He , Ethan Wang , Yuyang Rong , Zifei Cheng , Hao Chen

Recent evidence suggests that frontier AI systems can exhibit agentic misalignment, generating and executing harmful actions derived from internally constructed goals, even without explicit user requests. Existing mitigation methods, such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rong Xiang

Self-hosted computer-use agents (SHCUAs), such as OpenClaw, combine natural-language interaction with direct access to host-side resources, including browsers, files, scripts, system commands, and external communication channels. While…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Di Lu , Bo Zhang , Xiyuan Li , Yongzhi Liao , Xuewen Dong , Yulong Shen , Zhiquan Liu , Jianfeng Ma

Computer-use agent (CUA) frameworks, powered by large language models (LLMs) or multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), are rapidly maturing as assistants that can perceive context, reason, and act directly within software environments. Among their most…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Weidi Luo , Qiming Zhang , Tianyu Lu , Xiaogeng Liu , Bin Hu , Hung-Chun Chiu , Siyuan Ma , Yizhe Zhang , Xusheng Xiao , Yinzhi Cao , Zhen Xiang , Chaowei Xiao

Evaluating Computer Use Agents (CUAs) on interactive environments is fraught with methodological pitfalls that the field has yet to systematically address. We show that a 1MB replay script that blindly executes a recorded action sequence…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Pierluca D'Oro , Sneha Silwal , William Wong , Yuxuan Sun , Fanyi Xiao , Manchen Wang , Eric Gan , Allen Bolourchi , Joseph Tighe