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Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

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arxiv 2506.08837 v3 pith:6KPSY3BG submitted 2025-06-10 cs.LG cs.CR

Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

classification cs.LG cs.CR
keywords agentspatternspromptbecomedesigninjectionlanguagesecurity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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As AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile and capable of addressing a broad spectrum of tasks, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge. Among the most pressing threats are prompt injection attacks, which exploit the agent's resilience on natural language inputs -- an especially dangerous threat when agents are granted tool access or handle sensitive information. In this work, we propose a set of principled design patterns for building AI agents with provable resistance to prompt injection. We systematically analyze these patterns, discuss their trade-offs in terms of utility and security, and illustrate their real-world applicability through a series of case studies.

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Cited by 33 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Trojan Hippo: Weaponizing Agent Memory for Data Exfiltration

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Trojan Hippo attacks on LLM agent memory achieve 85-100% success rates in data exfiltration across four memory backends even after 100 benign sessions, while evaluated defenses reduce success rates but impose varying ...

  2. Prismata: Confining Cross-Site Prompt Injection in Web Agents

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.5

    Prismata cuts web-agent prompt-injection attack success from 85.5% to 0.7% via Biba-inspired DOM trust labeling and mechanical least-privilege confinement without site annotations.

  3. Beyond Self-Resolution: Settlement Factorization for Robust Natural Language Mechanism

    cs.GT 2026-07 accept novelty 7.5

    Settlement factorization is a normal form: every mechanism admits a ghost-reference label with leakage ε within factor two of optimal, and truthful margins degrade by at most the tight constant 2Lε.

  4. Agent Data Injection Attacks are Realistic Threats to AI Agents

    cs.CR 2026-07 accept novelty 7.0

    Agent data injection (ADI) forges trusted agent metadata via probabilistic delimiter injection and bypasses defenses built only for instruction injection.

  5. Data Flow Control: Data Safety Policies for AI Agents

    cs.DB 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Data Flow Control formalizes data safety as aggregate predicates over provenance monomials and implements enforcement via the Passant query rewriting layer achieving near-zero overhead across five DBMS engines.

  6. What You Approve Is What Executes: Consent Integrity for Black-Box LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The paper introduces Consent Integrity as the property that actions shown for approval must be rendered by a trusted mediator from the real boundary action over an unspoofable path and bound to execution, with uninspe...

  7. IPI-proxy: An Intercepting Proxy for Red-Teaming Web-Browsing AI Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    IPI-proxy is a toolkit using an intercepting proxy to inject indirect prompt injection attacks into live web pages for testing AI browsing agents against hidden instructions.

  8. LogJack: Indirect Prompt Injection Through Cloud Logs Against LLM Debugging Agents

    cs.CR 2026-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    LogJack shows indirect prompt injection via cloud logs succeeds in making LLM agents execute remote code on 6 of 8 models, with most cloud guardrails failing to detect the attacks.

  9. Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2025-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    ToolHijacker optimizes malicious tool documents via a two-phase strategy to hijack LLM agents' tool selection in no-box settings.

  10. AISPA: User-Centric System Prompt Auditing for Large Language Model Applications

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    A human-in-the-loop audit of system prompts from 88 commercial AI products finds protective instructions nearly universal yet incomplete, with ~40% of products containing at least one user-harmful directive.

  11. Are You Still the Agent I Authorized? Earned Authority under a Fixed Ceiling for Evolving Agents

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    Evolving agents may change active authority only beneath an immutable user-issued effect ceiling, and a transition envelope decides whether the old grant survives mutation at all.

  12. How Context Attribution Handles What the Model Already Knows

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Context attribution methods cannot disentangle in-context from in-weight knowledge and assign unfaithful scores under overlap; new metrics and WMDP-Cyber++ quantify the failure.

  13. Agent Security Needs Redefinition through a Holistic Framework

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Agent security should be redefined around four contextual authorization properties instead of the content of the action performed.

  14. IssueTrojanBench: Benchmarking AI Coding Agents Against Malicious Issue Requests

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    AI coding agents followed malicious instructions embedded in issue-style artifacts in 66.5% of 4,176 test runs.

  15. Specifying the Delegated-Autonomy Boundary: Requirements Engineering for Agentic AI

    cs.SE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A requirements-engineering framework that justifies when agentic AI is warranted (AJR) and specifies graduated autonomy, memory, coordination, assurance, and evolution policies (ADP).

  16. Janus: a Playground for User-Involved Agentic Permission Management

    cs.AI 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Janus is a publicly available playground system and evaluation harness for testing user-involved permission management designs in AI agents, demonstrating benefits of user input and the need for context-sensitive approaches.

  17. GIF: Locally Sound Geometric Information Flow Control for LLMs

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GIF introduces a Jacobian-based upper bound on input-output mutual information in LLMs with formal Lean proof and strong empirical recall on injection and leakage benchmarks.

  18. Game-Theoretic Multi-Agent Control for Robust Contextual Reasoning in LLMs

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GT-MCP coordinates three LLM agents via a trust function and rollback to bound contextual drift and block adversarial injections in multi-turn interactions.

  19. Web Agents Should Adopt the Plan-Then-Execute Paradigm

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Web agents should default to planning a complete task program before observing live web content to reduce prompt injection exposure, since WebArena tasks are compatible and 80% need no runtime LLM calls.

  20. Trojan Hippo: Weaponizing Agent Memory for Data Exfiltration

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

  21. Alignment Contracts for Agentic Security Systems

    cs.CR 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0 full

    Alignment contracts define scope, allowed effects, budgets and disclosure rules as safety properties over finite effect traces, with decidable admissibility, refinement rules, and Lean-verified soundness under an obse...

  22. Tracking Capabilities for Safer Agents

    cs.AI 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AI agents can generate code in a capability-safe Scala dialect that statically prevents information leakage and malicious side effects while preserving task performance.

  23. Semantic Attacks on Tool-Augmented LLMs: Securing the Model Context Protocol Against Descriptor-Level Manipulation

    cs.CR 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Descriptor-level manipulation in the Model Context Protocol can drive LLMs to unsafe tool selections in up to 36% of cases; a layered defense of integrity checks, auxiliary-LLM vetting, and runtime guardrails reduces ...

  24. Prevalence of Security and Privacy Risk-Inducing Usage of AI-based Conversational Agents

    cs.CR 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    Roughly a third of UK adults use AI chatbots weekly, and among them a substantial minority upload untrusted content, connect bots to other programs, share sensitive data, or attempt jailbreaks.

  25. When Compression Becomes an Attack Surface: Black-Box Attacks on Prompt-Compressed LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2025-10 reject novelty 6.0

    The paper claims prompt compression is a new attack surface, but the abstract's COMA attack never appears in the body and the body's SoftCom requires white-box access.

  26. Agents That Know Too Much: A Data-Centric Survey of Privacy in LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A data-centric survey finds that only information-flow control covers compositional and cross-session leakage in LLM agents and that no single benchmark tests an agent across all its data surfaces under one policy.

  27. Adaptive Evaluation of Out-of-Band Defenses Against Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    An independent reproduction on AgentDojo with Qwen2.5-7B finds that the Progent out-of-band defense reduces mean attack success from 25.8% to 4.2% and holds against a hand-crafted adaptive attack at 2.6%.

  28. Lingering Authority: Revocable Resource-and-Effect Capabilities for Coding Agents

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    PORTICO is a revocable capability reference monitor for coding agents that enforces task contracts via grant-invoke-closure lifecycles and rejects post-closure reuses while preserving task success.

  29. The Insurability Frontier of AI Risk: Mapping Threats to Affirmative Coverage, Silent Exposures, and Exclusions

    q-fin.RM 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper codes AI threats from OWASP/MITRE catalogs against public insurance materials to delineate a four-tier insurability frontier separating affirmative coverage, silent exposures, exclusions, and uninsurable perils.

  30. Adversarial Prompting Framework for AI Safety Assessment

    cs.CR 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0

    An adversarial prompt testing framework with a five-level attack taxonomy and a composite harmfulness score is proposed; the paper claims encoded prompts bypass safety filters most often.

  31. Agentic-J: An AI Agent for Biological Microscopy Image Analysis

    cs.MA 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Agentic-J is a multi-agent AI assistant that converts natural language descriptions of biological image analysis tasks into executable, reproducible scripts for ImageJ/Fiji with specialised sub-agents for plugin manag...

  32. Agentic AI Security: Threats, Defenses, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

    cs.AI 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey that taxonomizes threats to agentic AI, reviews benchmarks and evaluation methods, discusses technical and governance defenses, and identifies open challenges.

  33. Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A synthesis of 247 papers on LLM agent security identifies prompt injection and tool hijacking as dominant threats, notes weakly compositional defenses, and argues for trust boundaries and realistic evaluations.