arXiv AI

On the Effectiveness of Kernel-Level Evidence for Agent Security

The paper introduces the Agent Cross‑Layer Evidence (ACE) corpus, pairing application‑level telemetry with kernel‑level syscall traces to study agent security. It shows that kernel evidence alone is discriminative and that combining it with application‑level data outperforms either layer alone, revealing complementary signals. The study also demonstrates that this cross‑layer approach generalizes to unseen attack families and works across different agent runtimes.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

DiagChain: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents on Evidence-Grounded Attack Chain Reconstruction

arXiv:2608. 03591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer a promising approach to attack chain reconstruction by retrieving and interpreting heterogeneous telemetry to infer ordered attacker actions.

By Xuyang Liu, Yibin Han, Zhenwei Zhang, Kai Chang, Zhiwei Xu, Tian Qiu, Weixian Deng, Jiabao Gao, Xiaolin Peng, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao
arXiv AI
Jun 18

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects.

By Yuchuan Tian, Mengyu Zheng, Haocheng Mei, Ye Yuan, Chao Xu, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Yu Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

How Do LLM Agents Actually Get the Flag? Trace-Level Provenance for Agentic Offensive Security Evaluation

The paper introduces CTF-ABACUS, a trace-based auditing framework that reconstructs each autonomous language-model agent’s run in Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges into evidence‑grounded solve profiles. By decomposing actions into penetration‑testing phases and techniques, it distinguishes genuine exploitation from shortcut methods such as memorized recall or guessing. Applying the framework to 1,435 CTF attempts by six models on 240 challenges shows that only 62‑87% of recovered flags are trace‑verified, highlighting that many successes rely on shallow trajectories rather than true exploitation.

By Kimberly Milner, Minghao Shao, Nanda Rani, Haoran Xi, Venkata Sai Charan Putrevu, Meet Udeshi, Sandeep K. Shukla, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami, Muhammad Shafique, Ramesh Karri
arXiv AI
Jun 2

AgentRedBench: Dynamic Redteaming and Integration-Aware Defense for LLM Agents over SaaS Integrations

arXiv:2606. 02240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection in tool-use agents is a concrete production threat: LLM agents read from integrations (third-party services such as Gmail, Salesforce, or Jira accessed through tool calls) whose response content the user neither writes nor controls.

By Hiskias Dingeto, Will Leeney
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Will the User Ever Know? Covert Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents

The paper introduces covert indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks on tool‑using large language model agents, distinguishing between covert and overt successes. It defines new metrics—Covert Success Rate (CSR) and Overt Success Rate (OSR)—to capture whether users notice the injection. The authors propose ICoA, an attack that steers agents back to the user’s task after executing the injection, achieving higher CSR than existing methods on four target models.

By Yunseok Lee, Yunji Kim, Woojin Lee
arXiv AI
Jul 31

SecRespond: Benchmarking AI Agents for Real-World Post-Compromise Incident Response

arXiv:2607. 26791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly adopted in real-world security operations with access to host artifacts and command-line interfaces (CLIs), making it critical to thoroughly assess their security capabilities.

By Lehan Wang, Boli Chen, Ruixue Ding, Pengjun Xie, Jinwei Huang, Zhendong Liu, Shuo Wang, Tao Lei, Xin Ouyang, Xiaomeng Li