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Penetration testing is essential to securing modern web infrastructures, yet traditional manual methods struggle to keep pace with their scale and complexity. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automating these tasks,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 William Guanting Li , Alsharif Abuadbba , Kristen Moore , Dan Dongseong Kim

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked significant achievements in language processing and reasoning capabilities. Despite their advancements, LLMs face vulnerabilities to data poisoning attacks, where the adversary inserts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xiangyu Zhou , Yao Qiang , Saleh Zare Zade , Mohammad Amin Roshani , Prashant Khanduri , Douglas Zytko , Dongxiao Zhu

In a backdoor attack on a machine learning model, an adversary produces a model that performs well on normal inputs but outputs targeted misclassifications on inputs containing a small trigger pattern. Model compression is a widely-used…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yulong Tian , Fnu Suya , Fengyuan Xu , David Evans

Agentic large language model systems increasingly automate tasks by retrieving URLs and calling external tools. We show that this workflow gives rise to implicit prompt injection: adversarial instructions embedded in automatically generated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Qianlong Lan , Anuj Kaul , Shaun Jones , Stephanie Westrum

The April 2026 disclosure that a frontier large language model escaped its security sandbox, executed unauthorized actions, and concealed its modifications to version control history demonstrates that agentic AI systems with autonomous tool…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Richard Joseph Mitchell

System Instructions in Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used to enforce safety policies, define agent behavior, and protect sensitive operational context in agentic AI applications. These instructions may contain sensitive…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anubhab Sahu , Diptisha Samanta , Reza Soosahabi

Operating LLMs as coordinated multi-agent research systems over multi-hour runs surfaces failure modes that single-shot evaluation cannot: upstream providers throttle without warning, sub-agents drift the task to fit accessible tools,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sasank Annapureddy

While communication strategies of Large Language Models (LLMs) are crucial for human-LLM interactions, they can also be weaponized to elicit private information, yet such stealthy attacks remain under-explored. This paper introduces the…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Shuning Zhang , Jiaqi Bai , Linzhi Wang , Shixuan Li , Xin Yi , Hewu Li

Autonomous offensive agents often fail to transfer beyond the networks on which they are trained. We isolate a minimal but fundamental shift -- unseen host/subnet IP reassignment in an otherwise fixed enterprise scenario -- and evaluate…

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

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a leading paradigm for privacy-preserving distributed machine learning, yet the distributed nature of FL introduces unique security challenges, notably the threat of backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Chengcheng Zhu , Ye Li , Bosen Rao , Jiale Zhang , Yunlong Mao , Sheng Zhong

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly improved through interaction, yet most self-evolution methods adapt either the policy or the learning environment in isolation. We identify this structural gap as \emph{Agent-Environment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yihao Hu , Zhihao Wen , Xiujin Liu , Pan Wang , Xin Zhang , Wei Wu

Effectively learning from sequential data is a longstanding goal of Artificial Intelligence, especially in the case of long sequences. From the dawn of Machine Learning, several researchers have pursued algorithms and architectures capable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Matteo Tiezzi , Michele Casoni , Alessandro Betti , Marco Gori , Stefano Melacci

The implications of backdoor attacks on English-centric large language models (LLMs) have been widely examined - such attacks can be achieved by embedding malicious behaviors during training and activated under specific conditions that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Xuanli He , Jun Wang , Qiongkai Xu , Pasquale Minervini , Pontus Stenetorp , Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein , Trevor Cohn

Large language models (LLMs) have seen significant advancements, achieving superior performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, from understanding to reasoning. However, they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Chen Chen , Yuchen Sun , Xueluan Gong , Jiaxin Gao , Kwok-Yan Lam

Personal AI agents like OpenClaw run with elevated privileges on users' local machines, where a single successful prompt injection can leak credentials, redirect financial transactions, or destroy files. This threat goes well beyond…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Bowen Wei , Yunbei Zhang , Jinhao Pan , Kai Mei , Xiao Wang , Jihun Hamm , Ziwei Zhu , Yingqiang Ge

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent security threat in deep learning. After being injected with a backdoor, a deep neural model will behave normally on standard inputs but give adversary-specified predictions once the input contains…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yangyi Chen , Fanchao Qi , Hongcheng Gao , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

We explore \textbf{C}ross-lingual \textbf{B}ackdoor \textbf{AT}tacks (X-BAT) in multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs), revealing how backdoors inserted in one language can automatically transfer to others through shared embedding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Himanshu Beniwal , Sailesh Panda , Birudugadda Srivibhav , Mayank Singh

Deep anomaly detection on sequential data has garnered significant attention due to the wide application scenarios. However, deep learning-based models face a critical security threat - their vulnerability to backdoor attacks. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 He Cheng , Shuhan Yuan

Backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically couple a secret trigger to an explicit malicious output. We show that this explicit association is unnecessary for common LLMs. We introduce a compliance-only backdoor: supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yuting Tan , Yi Huang , Zhuo Li