Coding agents struggle to infer least-privilege file permissions by omitting needed accesses while granting unused or sensitive ones, but Sufficiency-Tightness Decomposition improves sensitive-task success by up to 15.8% and reduces attacks.
AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to persistent action over tools, files, and execution environments. Unlike chat systems, they maintain state across interactions and translate intermediate outputs into concrete actions. This creates a distinct safety challenge in that harmful behavior may emerge through sequences of individually plausible steps, including intermediate actions that appear locally acceptable but collectively lead to unauthorized actions. We present \textbf{AgentHazard}, a benchmark for evaluating harmful behavior in computer-use agents. AgentHazard contains \textbf{2,653} instances spanning diverse risk categories and attack strategies. Each instance pairs a harmful objective with a sequence of operational steps that are locally legitimate but jointly induce unsafe behavior. The benchmark evaluates whether agents can recognize and interrupt harm arising from accumulated context, repeated tool use, intermediate actions, and dependencies across steps. We evaluate AgentHazard on Claude Code, OpenClaw, and IFlow using mostly open or openly deployable models from the Qwen3, Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek families. Our experimental results indicate that current systems remain highly vulnerable. In particular, when powered by Qwen3-Coder, Claude Code exhibits an attack success rate of \textbf{73.63\%}, suggesting that model alignment alone does not reliably guarantee the safety of autonomous agents.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
fields
cs.CR 2years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2roles
background 1polarities
background 1representative citing papers
A TEE-backed architecture isolates security-critical decisions in self-hosted AI agents to prevent host-level abuse from malicious inputs while maintaining allowed functionality.
citing papers explorer
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Do Coding Agents Understand Least-Privilege Authorization?
Coding agents struggle to infer least-privilege file permissions by omitting needed accesses while granting unused or sensitive ones, but Sufficiency-Tightness Decomposition improves sensitive-task success by up to 15.8% and reduces attacks.
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Constraining Host-Level Abuse in Self-Hosted Computer-Use Agents via TEE-Backed Isolation
A TEE-backed architecture isolates security-critical decisions in self-hosted AI agents to prevent host-level abuse from malicious inputs while maintaining allowed functionality.