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Neural backdoors represent one primary threat to the security of deep learning systems. The intensive research has produced a plethora of backdoor attacks/defenses, resulting in a constant arms race. However, due to the lack of evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Ren Pang , Zheng Zhang , Xiangshan Gao , Zhaohan Xi , Shouling Ji , Peng Cheng , Xiapu Luo , Ting Wang

Recent advances have enabled LLM-powered AI agents to autonomously execute complex tasks by combining language model reasoning with tools, memory, and web access. But can these systems be trusted to follow deployment policies in realistic…

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 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

Personalized LLM agents maintain persistent cross-session state to support long-horizon collaboration. Yet, this persistence introduces a subtle but critical security vulnerability: routine user-agent interactions can gradually reshape an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiaoyu Xu , Minxin Du , Qipeng Xie , Haobin Ke , Qingqing Ye , Haibo Hu

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

Agentic AI require persistent memory to store user-specific histories beyond the limited context window of LLMs. Existing memory systems use dense vector databases or knowledge-graph traversal (or hybrid), incurring high retrieval latency…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yi Li , Lianjie Cao , Faraz Ahmed , Puneet Sharma , Bingzhe Li

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new paradigm of building natural language processing (NLP) systems: general-purpose, pre-trained language models (LMs) are composed with simple downstream models and fine-tuned for a variety of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Xinyang Zhang , Zheng Zhang , Shouling Ji , Ting Wang

Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with persistent memory enhances interaction continuity and personalization but introduces new safety risks. Specifically, contaminated or biased memory accumulation can trigger abnormal agent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Weiwei Xie , Shaoxiong Guo , Fan Zhang , Tian Xia , Xue Yang , Lizhuang Ma , Junchi Yan , Qibing Ren

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic systems that interact with an untrusted environment. However, LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks when handling untrusted data. In this paper we propose…

Exploration remains the key bottleneck for large language model agents trained with reinforcement learning. While prior methods exploit pretrained knowledge, they fail in environments requiring the discovery of novel states. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zeyuan Liu , Jeonghye Kim , Xufang Luo , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

The proliferation of open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) has democratized agentic AI, yet fine-tuned weights are frequently shared and adopted with limited scrutiny beyond leaderboard performance. This creates a risk where third-party…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Bhanu Pallakonda , Mikkel Hindsbo , Sina Ehsani , Prag Mishra

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from conversational assistants to autonomous agents embedded in critical organizational functions, including Security Operations Centers (SOCs), financial systems, and infrastructure…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Giuseppe Canale , Kashyap Thimmaraju

Tool-integrated agents are deployed on the premise that external tools ground their outputs in reality. Yet this very reliance creates a critical attack surface. Current evaluations benchmark capability in benign settings, asking "can the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zhonghao Zhan , Huichi Zhou , Zhenhao Li , Peiyuan Jing , Krinos Li , Hamed Haddadi

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools and retrieval systems to autonomously complete complex tasks. However, this design exposes agents to indirect prompt injection (IPI), where attacker-controlled context…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Tian Zhang , Yiwei Xu , Juan Wang , Keyan Guo , Xiaoyang Xu , Bowen Xiao , Quanlong Guan , Jinlin Fan , Jiawei Liu , Zhiquan Liu , Hongxin Hu

Large language model (LLM) agents are widely deployed in real-world applications, where they leverage tools to retrieve and manipulate external data for complex tasks. However, when interacting with untrusted data sources (e.g., fetching…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Hengyu An , Jinghuai Zhang , Tianyu Du , Chunyi Zhou , Qingming Li , Tao Lin , Shouling Ji

LLM-powered applications routinely embed secrets in system prompts, yet models can be tricked into revealing them. We built an adaptive attacker that evolves its strategies over hundreds of rounds and tested it against nine defense…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Priyal Deep , Shane Emmons , Amy Fox , Kyle Bacon , Kelley McAllister , Peter Ortiz , Krisztian Flautner

For LLM agents, memory management critically impacts efficiency, quality, and security. While much research focuses on retention, selective forgetting--inspired by human cognitive processes (hippocampal indexing/consolidation theory and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yingjie Gu , Wenjian Xiong , Liqiang Wang , Pengcheng Ren , Chao Li , Xiaojing Zhang , Yijuan Guo , Qi Sun , Jingyao Ma , Shidang Shi

The Hardware Trojan (HT) problem can be thought of as a continuous game between attackers and defenders, each striving to outsmart the other by leveraging any available means for an advantage. Machine Learning (ML) has recently played a key…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Amin Sarihi , Peter Jamieson , Ahmad Patooghy , Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy

In the vast domain of cybersecurity, the transition from reactive defense to offensive has become critical in protecting digital infrastructures. This paper explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into offensive…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Leroy Jacob Valencia