Roughly 1% of real resumes contain hidden prompt injections against LLM screeners, prevalence has risen over 1-2 years, and over 90% avoid explicit instructions.
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Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agents
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abstract
Tool selection is a key component of LLM agents. A popular approach follows a two-step process - \emph{retrieval} and \emph{selection} - to pick the most appropriate tool from a tool library for a given task. In this work, we introduce \textit{ToolHijacker}, a novel prompt injection attack targeting tool selection in no-box scenarios. ToolHijacker injects a malicious tool document into the tool library to manipulate the LLM agent's tool selection process, compelling it to consistently choose the attacker's malicious tool for an attacker-chosen target task. Specifically, we formulate the crafting of such tool documents as an optimization problem and propose a two-phase optimization strategy to solve it. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that ToolHijacker is highly effective, significantly outperforming existing manual-based and automated prompt injection attacks when applied to tool selection. Moreover, we explore various defenses, including prevention-based defenses (StruQ and SecAlign) and detection-based defenses (known-answer detection, DataSentinel, perplexity detection, and perplexity windowed detection). Our experimental results indicate that these defenses are insufficient, highlighting the urgent need for developing new defense strategies.
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Agentic Workflow Injection is a new injection vulnerability class in LLM-augmented GitHub Actions, with two patterns (P2A and P2S) detected via the TaintAWI tool yielding 496 confirmed exploitable instances across 13,392 workflows.
Agent-native LLMs are substantially more vulnerable to adversarial instructions arriving in tool descriptions than user messages (with the pattern reversing for general-purpose models and inverting again for tool outputs), as quantified by the new Safety Asymmetry Score across six models and three a
AIRGuard is a runtime authority-control layer for tool-using agents that reduces attack success on AgentTrap from 36.3% to 5.5% while retaining higher benign utility than ARGUS or MELON on DTAP-150.
Model-adaptive tool necessity shows 26-54% mismatch with actual tool calls across LLMs, driven by nearly orthogonal hidden-state signals for cognition versus action.
HAM³ achieves up to 78.3% attack success rate on the GQA benchmark by hierarchically attacking perception, communication, and reasoning layers in multi-modal multi-agent systems.
Sefz discovers specification violations in 29.9% of 402 real-world agent skills by translating guardrails into reachability goals and guiding LLM mutations with a multi-armed bandit.
FlowSteer is a prompt-only attack that biases multi-agent LLM workflow planning to propagate malicious signals, raising success rates by up to 55%, with FlowGuard as an input-side defense reducing it by up to 34%.
PACT achieves perfect security and utility under oracle provenance by enforcing argument-level trust contracts based on semantic roles and cross-step provenance tracking, outperforming invocation-level monitors in AgentDojo evaluations.
ShieldNet detects supply-chain poisoned tools in LLM agents by monitoring network interactions with a MITM proxy and lightweight classifier, reaching 0.995 F1 and 0.8% false positives on a new benchmark of 25+ attack types.
Prompt injection vulnerability in tool-augmented LLMs is a model-surface interaction rather than a fixed channel property; the same payload inverts success rates across models, and adaptive attack rate exceeds single-surface baselines by 9.1 pp on average.
BIV audits AI agent skills at scale, finding 80% deviate from declared behavior on 49,943 skills and achieving 0.946 F1 for malicious skill detection.
ARGUS defends LLM agents from context-aware prompt injections by tracking information provenance and verifying decisions against trustworthy evidence, reducing attack success to 3.8% while retaining 87.5% task utility.
CleanBase identifies malicious documents in RAG databases by detecting cliques in a semantic similarity graph constructed using embedding models and a statistical threshold.
Semia synthesizes Datalog representations of agent skills via constraint-guided loops to enable reachability queries for semantic risks, finding critical issues in over half of 13,728 real skills with 97.7% recall on expert-labeled samples.
BadSkill poisons embedded models in agent skills to achieve up to 99.5% attack success rate on triggered tasks with only 3% poison rate while preserving normal behavior on non-trigger inputs.
No existing AI security framework covers a majority of the 193 identified multi-agent system threats in any category, with OWASP Agentic Security Initiative achieving the highest overall coverage at 65.3%.
SkillVetBench is a two-stage benchmark combining natural-language semantic vetting and instrumented sandbox execution to detect and provide runtime evidence for malicious skills in open agent platforms, with experiments showing static methods miss up to 89% of threats.
VIPER-MCP detects and exploits taint-style vulnerabilities in Model Context Protocol servers via anchor-query static analysis and feedback-driven prompt evolution, uncovering 106 zero-day vulnerabilities across 39,884 repositories with 67 CVEs assigned.
CapSeal introduces a capability-sealed broker architecture that lets AI agents perform constrained secret-using actions without ever receiving the secrets themselves.
LLM agents exhibit temporal blindness, achieving no better than 65% normalized alignment with human preferences on tool-use decisions across time-sensitive scenarios in the new TicToc dataset.
The survey organizes security threats and defenses in autonomous LLM agents into four layers and identifies that risks can propagate across layers from inputs to ecosystem impacts.
STARS fuses static priors and contextual risk scoring for agent skill invocations, achieving modest AUPRC gains on prompt injection attacks in a new SIA-Bench but concluding it supplements rather than replaces static auditing.
citing papers explorer
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Demystifying and Detecting Agentic Workflow Injection Vulnerabilities in GitHub Actions
Agentic Workflow Injection is a new injection vulnerability class in LLM-augmented GitHub Actions, with two patterns (P2A and P2S) detected via the TaintAWI tool yielding 496 confirmed exploitable instances across 13,392 workflows.
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FlowSteer: Prompt-Only Workflow Steering Exposes Planning-Time Vulnerabilities in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
FlowSteer is a prompt-only attack that biases multi-agent LLM workflow planning to propagate malicious signals, raising success rates by up to 55%, with FlowGuard as an input-side defense reducing it by up to 34%.
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The Granularity Mismatch in Agent Security: Argument-Level Provenance Solves Enforcement and Isolates the LLM Reasoning Bottleneck
PACT achieves perfect security and utility under oracle provenance by enforcing argument-level trust contracts based on semantic roles and cross-step provenance tracking, outperforming invocation-level monitors in AgentDojo evaluations.
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Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills
BIV audits AI agent skills at scale, finding 80% deviate from declared behavior on 49,943 skills and achieving 0.946 F1 for malicious skill detection.
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Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis
Semia synthesizes Datalog representations of agent skills via constraint-guided loops to enable reachability queries for semantic risks, finding critical issues in over half of 13,728 real skills with 97.7% recall on expert-labeled samples.
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Security Considerations for Multi-agent Systems
No existing AI security framework covers a majority of the 193 identified multi-agent system threats in any category, with OWASP Agentic Security Initiative achieving the highest overall coverage at 65.3%.
- How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM Agent Skills: An Empirical Study