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RTBAS: Defending LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection and Privacy Leakage

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arxiv 2502.08966 v2 pith:IJVOVGIJ submitted 2025-02-13 cs.CR cs.AI

RTBAS: Defending LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection and Privacy Leakage

classification cs.CR cs.AI
keywords rtbasinjectionprompttbasagentattackschallengesconfirmation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Tool-Based Agent Systems (TBAS) allow Language Models (LMs) to use external tools for tasks beyond their standalone capabilities, such as searching websites, booking flights, or making financial transactions. However, these tools greatly increase the risks of prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks the LM agent to leak confidential data or trigger harmful actions. Existing defenses (OpenAI GPTs) require user confirmation before every tool call, placing onerous burdens on users. We introduce Robust TBAS (RTBAS), which automatically detects and executes tool calls that preserve integrity and confidentiality, requiring user confirmation only when these safeguards cannot be ensured. RTBAS adapts Information Flow Control to the unique challenges presented by TBAS. We present two novel dependency screeners, using LM-as-a-judge and attention-based saliency, to overcome these challenges. Experimental results on the AgentDojo Prompt Injection benchmark show RTBAS prevents all targeted attacks with only a 2% loss of task utility when under attack, and further tests confirm its ability to obtain near-oracle performance on detecting both subtle and direct privacy leaks.

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Cited by 30 Pith papers

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

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    NeuroTaint is the first taint tracking framework for LLM agents that uses offline auditing of semantic, causal, and persistent context to detect flows from untrusted sources to privileged sinks.

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

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.5

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  3. DualView: Preventing Indirect Prompt Injection in Personal AI Agents

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    PIIGuard uses optimized hidden HTML fragments on webpages to block LLMs from leaking contact PII via indirect prompt injection, achieving at least 97% defense success across tested models while preserving benign QA utility.

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    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

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  11. AgentDyn: Are Your Agent Security Defenses Deployable in Real-World Dynamic Environments?

    cs.CR 2026-02 accept novelty 7.0

    AgentDyn benchmark demonstrates that current AI agent defenses against prompt injection fail to handle dynamic real-world conditions.

  12. Data Leakage Prevention in Agentic Applications via Preemptive Hardening

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A build-time pipeline that scans, patches, and validates agentic LLM apps reduced prompt-injection leakage to 0% on most tested apps and by 91% on the hardest stress case.

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

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

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  14. SecureClaw: Clawing Back Control of LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SecureClaw is a dual-boundary defense placing data confinement at reads and authorization at writes, achieving near-zero attack success while retaining task utility on AgentDojo, AgentLeak, and ASB.

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  16. Relevance as a Vulnerability: How Web Retrieval Degrades Safety Alignment in LLM Agents

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  17. Aligning Provenance with Authorization: A Dual-Graph Defense for LLM Agents

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AuthGraph aligns an execution provenance graph with a clean authorization graph to detect parameter-source deviations from user intent, reducing attack success rates to 1-2% on AgentDojo and AgentDyn while retaining m...

  18. Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis

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  19. An AI Agent Execution Environment to Safeguard User Data

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  20. Don't Make Models Guess Security and Safety: Symbolic Guardrails for Domain-Specific AI Agents

    cs.SE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Symbolic guardrails enforce about 74% of agent security and safety requirements on three benchmarks with mostly simple checks, improving safety without sacrificing utility.

  21. Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction

    cs.CR 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    The method prompts LLMs to output both answers and references to the executed instructions, then filters out any answers not linked to the original input instructions, reducing attack success rates to zero in tested s...

  22. 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.

  23. 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%.

  24. Reframing LLM Agent Security as an Agent-Human Interaction Problem

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    LLM agent security is reframed as an agent-human interaction issue, supported by a survey showing industry preference for human-centric mechanisms over academic favorites and proposing a new research agenda.

  25. When Agents Handle Secrets: A Survey of Confidential Computing for Agentic AI

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A survey providing a taxonomy of TEE platforms, an agent-centric threat model, and open challenges for applying confidential computing to secure agentic AI systems.

  26. Don't Make Models Guess Security and Safety: Symbolic Guardrails for Domain-Specific AI Agents

    cs.SE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Symbolic guardrails enforce 74% of specified safety policies in agent benchmarks and boost safety without hurting utility.

  27. Assessing Automated Prompt Injection Attacks in Agentic Environments

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Black-box optimization outperforms gradient-based methods for prompt injection on LLM agents, with success depending on attacker model strength and limited transfer from small to frontier models.

  28. When Agents Handle Secrets: A Survey of Confidential Computing for Agentic AI

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A structured survey of confidential computing for agentic AI that catalogs TEE platforms, agent-specific threats, transferable defenses, and remaining gaps in end-to-end frameworks.

  29. 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.

  30. Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges

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