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Agent Skills have become a practical way to extend LLM agents by packaging metadata, natural-language instructions, and executable resources into reusable capability bundles. However, this growing Skill ecosystem introduces a new compliance…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jiangrong Wu , Yuhong Nan , Yixi Lin , Huaijin Wang , Yuming Xiao , Shuai Wang , Zibin Zheng

Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Zaibin Zhang , Yongting Zhang , Lijun Li , Hongzhi Gao , Lijun Wang , Huchuan Lu , Feng Zhao , Yu Qiao , Jing Shao

Language model (LM) agents that act on users' behalf for personal tasks (e.g., replying emails) can boost productivity, but are also susceptible to unintended privacy leakage risks. We present the first study on people's capacity to oversee…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhiping Zhang , Bingcan Guo , Tianshi Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as tool-using agents, shifting safety concerns from harmful text generation to harmful task completion. Deployed systems often condition on user profiles or persistent memory, yet agent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Caglar Yildirim

As agent systems scale, skills accumulate into large reusable libraries, yet their scaling laws remain poorly understood. Across 15 frontier LLMs, 1,141 real-world skills, and over 3M routing or execution decisions, we identify two coupled…

LLMs are increasingly capable of persuasion, which raises the question of how to protect users against manipulation. In a preregistered user study (N=120) across four decision-making scenarios, we find that an adversarial LLM with a hidden…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Lennart Wachowiak , Scott D. Blain , David Williams-King , Samuele Marro

Equipped with various tools and knowledge, GPTs, one kind of customized AI agents based on OpenAI's large language models, have illustrated great potential in many fields, such as writing, research, and programming. Today, the number of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Tong Wu , Weibin Wu , Zibin Zheng

Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive…

As LLM-based agents increasingly operate in multi-agent systems, understanding adversarial manipulation becomes critical for defensive design. We present a systematic study of intentional deception as an engineered capability, using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jason Starace , Terence Soule

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

Research on large language model (LLM) security is shifting from "will the model leak training data" to a more consequential question: can an agent with persistent, long-term memory be continuously shaped, cross-session poisoned, accessed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zehao Lin , Chunyu Li , Kai Chen

LLM agents with tool access can discover and exploit security vulnerabilities. This is known. What is not known is which features of a system prompt trigger this behaviour, and which do not. We present a systematic taxonomy based on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Charafeddine Mouzouni

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents are an emerging computing paradigm that blends generative machine learning with tools such as code interpreters, web browsing, email, and more generally, external resources. These agent-based systems…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Xiaohan Fu , Shuheng Li , Zihan Wang , Yihao Liu , Rajesh K. Gupta , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Earlence Fernandes

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in multi-step decision-making, planning and actions, and are increasingly integrated into various real-world applications. It is concerning whether their strong problem-solving…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yilin Tang , Yu Wang , Lanlan Qiu , Wenchang Gao , Yunfei Ma , Baicheng Chen , Tianxing He

Malicious cyber activity is ubiquitous and its harmful effects have dramatic and often irreversible impacts on society. Given the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, the ever-evolving adversary, the massive amounts of data which could…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-02 John Emanuello , Kimberly Ferguson-Walter , Erik Hemberg , Una-May O Reilly , Ahmad Ridley , Dennis Ross , Diane Staheli , William Streilein

What should a developer inspect before deploying an LLM agent: the model, the tool code, the deployment configuration, or all three? In practice, many security failures in agent systems arise not from model weights alone, but from the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Haiyue Zhang , Yi Nian , Yue Zhao

AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually experience misalignment. We present an observational study of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ningzhi Tang , Chaoran Chen , Gelei Xu , Yiyu Shi , Yu Huang , Collin McMillan , Tao Dong , Toby Jia-Jun Li

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes scenarios, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) domains. Based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Rongwu Xu , Xiaojian Li , Shuo Chen , Wei Xu

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

Modern AI agents execute real-world side effects through tool calls such as file operations, shell commands, HTTP requests, and database queries. A single unsafe action, including accidental deletion, credential exposure, or data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chenglin Yang