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Related papers: AI Agents May Always Fall for Prompt Injections

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AI agents interact with external environments through tool calls, exposing them to attacks like indirect prompt injection that can trigger unauthorized actions. Securing these agents is challenging: they behave autonomously and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tianneng Shi , Jingxuan He , Zhun Wang , Hongwei Li , Linyu Wu , Wenbo Guo , Dawn Song

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) with full system access enable powerful task automation but pose significant security and privacy risks due to their ability to manipulate files, access user data, and execute arbitrary commands. While prior work…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tri Cao , Bennett Lim , Yue Liu , Yuan Sui , Yuexin Li , Shumin Deng , Lin Lu , Nay Oo , Shuicheng Yan , Bryan Hooi

AI control protocols serve as a defense mechanism to stop untrusted LLM agents from causing harm in autonomous settings. Prior work treats this as a security problem, stress testing with exploits that use the deployment context to subtly…

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) systems suggests that artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems may soon arrive. Many researchers are concerned that AIs and AGIs will harm humans via intentional misuse (AI-misuse)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Catalin Mitelut , Ben Smith , Peter Vamplew

As LLM agents transition from digital assistants to physical controllers in autonomous systems and robotics, they face an escalating threat from indirect prompt injection. By embedding adversarial instructions into the results of tool…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Qiang Yu , Xinran Cheng , Chuanyi Liu

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

AI agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly deployed in local workflows with access to external tools. This creates indirect prompt-injection (IPI) risk: an agent may execute harmful instructions embedded in untrusted inputs such as email,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Lei Zhao , Abhay Bhaskar , Edgar Dobriban

The endowment of AI with reasoning capabilities and some degree of agency is widely viewed as a path toward more capable and generalizable systems. Our position is that the current development of agentic AI requires a more holistic,…

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

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents can now orchestrate cyberattacks. This development is already increasing the speed and scale of cyber attacks, decreasing attack costs, and improving the operational autonomy of cyber capabilities. To…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Matt Mittelsteadt , Jam Kraprayoon , Robin Staes-Polet , Oskar Galeev , Jan Wehner , Christopher Covino , Shaun Ee

Indirect prompt injection threatens LLM agents by embedding malicious instructions in external content, enabling unauthorized actions and data theft. LLM agents maintain working memory through their context window, which stores interaction…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ruoyao Wen , Hao Li , Chaowei Xiao , Ning Zhang

In an era marked by unprecedented digital complexity, the cybersecurity landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace, challenging traditional defense paradigms. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) reveal inherent vulnerabilities in conventional…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Krti Tallam

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

Language models remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks despite extensive safety training. We trace this failure to role confusion: models infer the source of text based on how it sounds, not where it actually comes from. A command…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Charles Ye , Jasmine Cui , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models are being deployed in production with capabilities including shell execution, file system access, database queries, and multi-party communication. Recent red teaming research…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Saikat Maiti

Agentic frameworks are the software layer through which AI agents act in the world. Existing safety methods intervene on the model and therefore remain conditional on unverifiable properties of learned behavior. We introduce containment…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Royce Moon , Lav R. Varshney

Web agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) enable autonomous interaction with web environments by perceiving and acting on both visual and textual webpage content to accomplish user-specified tasks. However, they are highly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yulin Chen , Tri Cao , Haoran Li , Yue Liu , Yibo Li , Yufei He , Le Minh Khoi , Yangqiu Song , Shuicheng Yan , Bryan Hooi

Enterprise LLM agents can dramatically improve workplace productivity, but their core capability, retrieving and using internal context to act on a user's behalf, also creates new risks for sensitive information leakage. We introduce…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Wenjie Fu , Xiaoting Qin , Jue Zhang , Qingwei Lin , Lukas Wutschitz , Robert Sim , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang

Agentic AI increasingly intervenes proactively by inferring users' situations from contextual data yet often fails for lack of principled judgment about when, why, and whether to act. We address this gap by proposing a conceptual model that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Soyoung Jung , Daehoo Yoon , Sung Gyu Koh , Young Hwan Kim , Yehan Ahn , Sung Park

A Large Language Model (LLM) powered GUI agent is a specialized autonomous system that performs tasks on the user's behalf according to high-level instructions. It does so by perceiving and interpreting the graphical user interfaces (GUIs)…