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Related papers: ClawSafety: "Safe" LLMs, Unsafe Agents

200 papers

OpenClaw-like agents offer substantial productivity benefits, yet they are insecure by default because they combine untrusted inputs, autonomous action, extensibility, and privileged system access within a single execution loop. We use…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Zongwei Li , Wenkai Li , Xiaoqi Li

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the secure deployment of large language models (LLMs), enabling adversaries to implant hidden behaviors triggered by specific inputs. However, existing methods often rely on manually crafted…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yige Li , Zhe Li , Wei Zhao , Nay Myat Min , Hanxun Huang , Xingjun Ma , Jun Sun

OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Songyang Liu , Chaozhuo Li , Chenxu Wang , Jinyu Hou , Zejian Chen , Litian Zhang , Zheng Liu , Qiwei Ye , Yiming Hei , Xi Zhang , Zhongyuan Wang

Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinhu Qi , Muzhi Li , Jiahong Liu , Yuqin Shu , Dianzhi Yu , Shicheng Ma , Wenqian Cui , Yiyang Zhao , Yiyi Chen , Ruoxi Jiang , Irwin King , Zenglin Xu

Autonomous browsing agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate web-based tasks. However, their reliance on dynamic content, tool execution, and user-provided data exposes them to a broad attack surface.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Mykyta Mudryi , Markiyan Chaklosh , Grzegorz Wójcik

Recent improvement gains in large language models (LLMs) have lead to everyday usage of AI-based Conversational Agents (CAs). At the same time, LLMs are vulnerable to an array of threats, including jailbreaks and, for example, causing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Kathrin Grosse , Nico Ebert

Autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly operate as long-running processes forming densely interconnected multi-agent ecosystems, whose security properties remain largely unexplored. In particular, OpenClaw, an open-source platform with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yihao Zhang , Zeming Wei , Xiaokun Luan , Chengcan Wu , Zhixin Zhang , Jiangrong Wu , Haolin Wu , Huanran Chen , Jun Sun , Meng Sun

Although large language model (LLM)-based agents, exemplified by OpenClaw, are increasingly evolving from task-oriented systems into personalized AI assistants for solving complex real-world tasks, their practical deployment also introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yuhang Wang , Feiming Xu , Zheng Lin , Guangyu He , Yuzhe Huang , Haichang Gao , Zhenxing Niu , Shiguo Lian , Zhaoxiang Liu

As AI agents increasingly operate in complex environments, ensuring reliable, context-aware privacy is critical for regulatory compliance. Traditional access controls are insufficient because privacy risks often arise after access is…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents face security vulnerabilities spanning AI-specific and traditional software domains, yet current research addresses these separately. This study bridges this gap through comparative evaluation of Function…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Tarek Gasmi , Ramzi Guesmi , Ines Belhadj , Jihene Bennaceur

Tool-augmented LLM agents introduce security risks that extend beyond user-input filtering, including indirect prompt injection through fetched content, unsafe tool execution, credential leakage, and tampering with local control files. We…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Frank Li

Reusable skills are becoming a common interface for extending large language model agents, packaging procedural guidance with access to files, tools, memory, and execution environments. However, this modularity introduces attack surfaces…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Chang Jin , An Wang , Zeming Wei , Kai Wang , Biaojie Zeng , Qiaosheng Zhang , Chao Yang , Jingjing Qu , Xia Hu , Xingcheng Xu

As autonomous agents (e.g., OpenClaw) increasingly operate with deep system-level privileges to execute complex tasks, they introduce severe, unmitigated security risks. Current vulnerability analyses overwhelmingly focus on single-turn,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jianan Ma , Xiaohu Du , Ruixiao Lin , Yaoxiang Bian , Jialuo Chen , Jingyi Wang , Xiaofang Yang , Shiwen Cui , Changhua Meng , Xinhao Deng , Zhen Wang

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly integrated into software development workflows, offering capabilities that extend beyond code suggestion to active system interaction and environment management. OpenClaw, a representative platform…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Fazhong Liu , Zhuoyan Chen , Tu Lan , Haozhen Tan , Zhenyu Xu , Xiang Li , Guoxing Chen , Yan Meng , Haojin Zhu

We analyzed 3,984 AI agent skills from major marketplaces and found 76 confirmed malicious payloads, including credential theft, backdoor installation, and data exfiltration. 13.4% of all skills contain at least one critical-level security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Luca Beurer-Kellner , Aleksei Kudrinskii , Marco Milanta , Kristian Bonde Nielsen , Hemang Sarkar , Liran Tal

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

LLM agents are evolving rapidly, powered by code execution, tools, and the recently introduced agent skills feature. Skills allow users to extend LLM applications with specialized third-party code, knowledge, and instructions. Although this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-26 David Schmotz , Luca Beurer-Kellner , Sahar Abdelnabi , Maksym Andriushchenko

Agentic AI systems, specifically LLM-driven agents that plan, invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and delegate tasks to peer agents via protocols such as MCP and A2A, introduce a threat surface that differs materially from standalone…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Javad Forough , Marios Kogias , Hamed Haddadi

As AI systems gain increasing autonomy and execution capability, the number of discovered security vulnerabilities continues to rise. However, many of these vulnerabilities are not fundamentally novel, but instead reflect recurring classes…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin Eykholt , Dhilung Kirat , Xiaokui Shu , Jiyong Jang , Frederico Araujo , Ian Molloy

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