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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to help security analysts manage the surge of cyber threats, automating tasks from vulnerability assessment to incident response. Yet in operational CTI workflows, reliability gaps remain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yuqiao Meng , Luoxi Tang , Feiyang Yu , Jinyuan Jia , Guanhua Yan , Ping Yang , Zhaohan Xi

Tool-using agents increasingly operate in open-ended deployment environments, where they compose file systems, web APIs, code interpreters, and enterprise services at runtime. This creates a safety gap in tool composition: an agent can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xiaochong Jiang , Shiqi Yang , Ziwei Li , Lifei Liu , Haoran Yu , Yichen Liu

As AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) increasingly use external tools for high-stakes decisions, a critical reliability question arises: how do errors propagate across sequential tool calls? We introduce the first theoretical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Flint Xiaofeng Fan , Cheston Tan , Roger Wattenhofer , Yew-Soon Ong

Large language model (LLM) agents have exhibited strong problem-solving competence across domains like research and coding. Yet, it remains underexplored whether LLM agents can tackle compounding real-world problems that require a diverse…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Hanwen Xu , Xuyao Huang , Yuzhe Liu , Kai Yu , Zhijie Deng

Large language model (LLM)-based agents combine LLMs with external tools to automate tasks such as scheduling meetings, managing documents, or booking travel. While these integrations unlock powerful capabilities, they also create new and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Jonathan Evertz , Merlin Chlosta , Lea Schönherr , Thorsten Eisenhofer

In a malicious tool attack, an attacker uploads a malicious tool to a distribution platform; once a user inadvertently installs the tool and the LLM agent selects it during task execution, the tool can compromise the user's security and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuepeng Hu , Yuqi Jia , Mengyuan Li , Dawn Song , Neil Gong

As LLMs advance into autonomous agents with tool-use capabilities, they introduce security challenges that extend beyond traditional content-based LLM safety concerns. This paper introduces Sequential Tool Attack Chaining (STAC), a novel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jing-Jing Li , Jianfeng He , Chao Shang , Devang Kulshreshtha , Xun Xian , Yi Zhang , Hang Su , Sandesh Swamy , Yanjun Qi

MCP standardizes how LLMs interact with external systems, forming the foundation for general agents. However, existing MCP benchmarks remain narrow in scope: they focus on read-heavy tasks or tasks with limited interaction depth, and fail…

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yu Cui , Bryan Hooi , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into agentic systems that reason, plan, and operate external tools. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a key enabler of this transition, offering a standardized interface for connecting LLMs with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Xuanjun Zong , Zhiqi Shen , Lei Wang , Yunshi Lan , Chao Yang

Tool-augmented LLM agents raise new security risks: tool executions can introduce runtime-only behaviors, including prompt injection and unintended exposure of external inputs (e.g., environment secrets or local files). While existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Zhuoran Tan , Run Hao , Jeremy Singer , Yutian Tang , Christos Anagnostopoulos

AI agent frameworks connecting large language model (LLM) reasoning to host execution surfaces -- shell, filesystem, containers, and messaging -- introduce security challenges structurally distinct from conventional software. We present a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Surada Suwansathit , Yuxuan Zhang , Guofei Gu

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools. Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Guozhao Mo , Wenliang Zhong , Jiawei Chen , Qianhao Yuan , Xuanang Chen , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Ben He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard for connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) to external tools and data. However, MCP servers often expose privileged capabilities, such as file system access, network requests, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Charoes Huang , Xin Huang , Amin Milani Fard

Tool learning serves as a powerful auxiliary mechanism that extends the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle complex tasks requiring real-time relevance or high precision operations. Behind its powerful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Liuji Chen , Hao Gao , Jinghao Zhang , Qiang Liu , Shu Wu , Liang Wang

Tool use enables large language models (LLMs) to access external information, invoke software systems, and act in digital environments beyond what can be solved from model parameters alone. Early research mainly studied whether a model…

LLM agents are beginning to invoke industrial asset-management tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet whether they can act reliably on this substrate for safety-critical \emph{Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)} is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tianjun Feng , Yunfeng Chen , Chun-Yi Tsai , Yihan Sun , Ayan Das , Kaoutar El Maghraoui , Shuxin Lin , Dhaval Patel

Recently, autonomous agents built on large language models (LLMs) have experienced significant development and are being deployed in real-world applications. These agents can extend the base LLM's capabilities in multiple ways. For example,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Boyang Zhang , Yicong Tan , Yun Shen , Ahmed Salem , Michael Backes , Savvas Zannettou , Yang Zhang

Multi-agent systems coordinate LLM-based agents to perform tasks on users' behalf. In real-world applications, multi-agent systems will inevitably interact with untrusted inputs, such as malicious Web content, files, email attachments, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Harold Triedman , Rishi Jha , Vitaly Shmatikov

The development of large language models (LLMs) has entered in a experience-driven era, flagged by the emergence of environment feedback-driven learning via reinforcement learning and tool-using agents. This encourages the emergenece of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Junfeng Fang , Zijun Yao , Ruipeng Wang , Haokai Ma , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua