Beyond Handcrafted Security: Towards Self-Evolving Defense for LLM Agents
arXiv:2608. 12977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The expanding operational capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents introduce sophisticated security threats.
arXiv:2608. 12977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The expanding operational capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents introduce sophisticated security threats.
arXiv:2609.38291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to safety risks such as injected malicious instructions or misleading information, motivating runtim...
arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
HarnessRisk is a lifecycle-oriented benchmark for evaluating safety in agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, state, permissions, and external actions. It defines six operational phases—Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery—and includes 128 sandboxed cases pairing benign user objectives with adversarial instructions. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 configurations, attack success rates vary from 12.6% to 80.9%, with the most vulnerable phase being Harness Configuration. "whyItMatters":"The benchmark demonstrates that safety failures can arise in multiple harness responsibilities and that even explicit risk detection does not guarantee safe action, underscoring the need for comprehensive evaluation across model and harness configurations."
The paper introduces T-MAP, a trajectory‑aware evolutionary search technique designed to red‑team large language model agents by exploiting vulnerabilities that arise during multi‑step tool execution. Unlike traditional methods that focus on harmful text, T‑MAP uses execution trajectories to generate adversarial prompts that bypass safety guardrails and achieve harmful objectives through actual tool interactions. Experiments across various Model Context Protocol environments show that T‑MAP outperforms baseline methods in attack realization rate and remains effective against advanced models such as GPT‑5.2, Gemini‑3‑Pro, Qwen3.5, and GLM‑5.
arXiv:2606. 14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents.
arXiv:2606. 02302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents increasingly operate in stateful environments where they access tools, files, memory, and external services.
arXiv:2608. 06984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern agent harnesses persist state across tasks and sessions through persistent carriers like memory, skills, tools, and shared artifacts.
arXiv:2608. 09476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cowork agents may complete benign tasks while disclosing protected data, manipulating unauthorized state, invocate unauthorized API.
arXiv:2610.03153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Workspace agents combine large language models with execution harnesses to perform stateful, multi-step tasks that access or modify external resource...
arXiv:2602. 09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf.
arXiv:2606. 20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents.