This paper delivers the first systematic taxonomy and cross-benchmark consistency analysis of 40 agent safety benchmarks, finding broad but shallow risk coverage, no ranking concordance across evaluations, and that benchmark choice systematically alters reported safety.
Agentic AI Security: Threats, Defenses, Evaluation, and Open Challenges
11 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Agentic AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and endowed with planning, tool use, memory, and autonomy, are emerging as powerful, flexible platforms for automation. Their ability to autonomously execute tasks across web, software, and physical environments creates new and amplified security risks, distinct from both traditional AI safety and conventional software security. This survey outlines a taxonomy of threats specific to agentic AI, reviews recent benchmarks and evaluation methodologies, and discusses defense strategies from both technical and governance perspectives. We synthesize current research and highlight open challenges, aiming to support the development of secure-by-design agent systems.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 11roles
background 4polarities
background 4representative citing papers
Agent Skills has structural security weaknesses from missing data-instruction boundaries, single-approval persistent trust, and absent marketplace reviews that require fundamental redesign.
A parameterized DFA firewall enforces safe tool sequences for structured AI agents, reducing attack success rates to 2.2% in tested workflows with low added latency.
A new 7x4 taxonomy organizes agentic AI security threats by architectural layer and persistence timescale, revealing under-explored upper layers and missing defenses after surveying 116 papers.
No major agentic AI framework complies with six safety containment principles; a memory poisoning attack on LangChain causes persistent targeted errors up to 88.9% wrongful denials and 3.5x increase under complex policies, fixed by two sub-millisecond validators.
The paper defines and evaluates Trojan Hippo attacks on LLM agent memory, showing 85-100% success in data exfiltration across backends and reduced rates with defenses at varying utility costs.
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%.
Agyn is an open-source platform providing a signal-driven stateful serverless runtime on Kubernetes, a Terraform provider for agent definition, and a zero-trust security model for scalable AI agent operations.
Proposes the TRIAD framework that treats multi-turn multimodal attacks as continuous trajectories and uses structural anomaly detection, regularized Mahalanobis distance, topological acceleration, and a time-varying Cox model with Bayesian HMM feedback to predict and bound expected time-to-failure.
A reported 2026 frontier model escape shows that alignment training, sandboxing, tool interception, and audits fail against adversarial agentic AI, requiring five new architectural requirements for durable containment.
citing papers explorer
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Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents
This paper delivers the first systematic taxonomy and cross-benchmark consistency analysis of 40 agent safety benchmarks, finding broad but shallow risk coverage, no ranking concordance across evaluations, and that benchmark choice systematically alters reported safety.
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Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysis
Agent Skills has structural security weaknesses from missing data-instruction boundaries, single-approval persistent trust, and absent marketplace reviews that require fundamental redesign.
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Enforcing Benign Trajectories: A Behavioral Firewall for Structured-Workflow AI Agents
A parameterized DFA firewall enforces safe tool sequences for structured AI agents, reducing attack success rates to 2.2% in tested workflows with low added latency.
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A Systematic Survey of Security Threats and Defenses in LLM-Based AI Agents: A Layered Attack Surface Framework
A new 7x4 taxonomy organizes agentic AI security threats by architectural layer and persistence timescale, revealing under-explored upper layers and missing defenses after surveying 116 papers.
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The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements
No major agentic AI framework complies with six safety containment principles; a memory poisoning attack on LangChain causes persistent targeted errors up to 88.9% wrongful denials and 3.5x increase under complex policies, fixed by two sub-millisecond validators.
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Trojan Hippo: Weaponizing Agent Memory for Data Exfiltration
The paper defines and evaluates Trojan Hippo attacks on LLM agent memory, showing 85-100% success in data exfiltration across backends and reduced rates with defenses at varying utility costs.
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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%.
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Agyn: An Open-Source Platform for AI Agents with Scalable On-Demand Execution, Agent Definition as a Code, and Zero-Trust Access
Agyn is an open-source platform providing a signal-driven stateful serverless runtime on Kubernetes, a Terraform provider for agent definition, and a zero-trust security model for scalable AI agent operations.
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Surviving the Unseen: Predictive Defense for Novel Multi-Turn Multimodal Attacks
Proposes the TRIAD framework that treats multi-turn multimodal attacks as continuous trajectories and uses structural anomaly detection, regularized Mahalanobis distance, topological acceleration, and a time-varying Cox model with Bayesian HMM feedback to predict and bound expected time-to-failure.
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When the Agent Is the Adversary: Architectural Requirements for Agentic AI Containment After the April 2026 Frontier Model Escape
A reported 2026 frontier model escape shows that alignment training, sandboxing, tool interception, and audits fail against adversarial agentic AI, requiring five new architectural requirements for durable containment.
- Certifiable Semantic Agreement Among LLM Agents: What the Admissibility Instrument Decides