arXiv AI

TrustShiftProbe: Characterizing, Benchmarking, and Defending Staged Trust Attacks on MCP Servers

The paper introduces TrustShiftProbe, a framework that characterizes and defends against staged trust attacks on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. It defines a temporal threat model where a compromised server behaves benignly during conditioning and later delivers adversarial payloads, and presents a multi‑tier runtime defense called SHIELD that reduces attack success from 69.5% to 42.7%. The work also provides a taxonomy of nine TrustShift variants across different execution mechanisms and objectives.

arXiv AI
Oct 26

MCPHunt: An Evaluation Framework for Cross-Boundary Data Propagation in Multi-Server MCP Agents

MCPHunt is a benchmark framework that isolates non‑adversarial credential propagation across multi‑server MCP trust boundaries. It uses canary‑based taint tracking, a controlled coverage design with risky, benign, and hard‑negative conditions, and completion‑requires‑secret stratification to separate faithful from policy‑violating propagation. Across 3,615 traces from 5 models, policy‑violating propagation rates range from 11.5 % to 41.3 %, with mitigation via prompting reducing rates to 0.3 % while retaining 80.5 % utility.

By Haonan Li, Tianjun Sun, Yongqing Wang, Qisheng Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Attested Tool-Server Admission: A Security Extension to the Model Context Protocol

arXiv:2605. 24248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how a large-language-model (LLM) agent and an external tool server exchange messages, but not trust: a host reads a server's self-declared tool list and dispatches calls, with no notion of which servers it may use, at what sensitivity, or which of a server's tools are in bounds.

By Alfredo Metere
arXiv AI
Jun 12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606. 13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences.

By Zihao Wang, Yiming Li, Yutong Wu, Zheyu Liu, Kangjie Chen, Fok Kar Wai, Pin-Yu Chen, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing, Bo Li, Dacheng Tao, Tianwei Zhang
arXiv AI
6d ago

Log-To-Leak: Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents via the Model Context Protocol

The paper "Log-To-Leak: Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents via the Model Context Protocol" investigates how natural-language metadata in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can be exploited to inject malicious post‑hoc logging calls into large language model agents. The authors introduce the Log-To-Leak attack, which adds an attacker‑controlled call after a legitimate tool invocation, targeting user queries, MCP server names, server responses, and agent responses. Experiments across five MCP servers and four LLM agents show high attack success rates (up to 100%) and significant logging accuracy, while existing defenses still leave substantial residual risk.

By Yuepeng Hu, Chongyu Fan, Sirat Samyoun, Jian Du
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Delegation Without Trust: An Empirical Gap Analysis of Identity, Authorization, and Runtime Governance in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

The paper examines the security challenges of delegating authority to autonomous LLM agents that act on users’ behalf. It introduces a threat model with four adversaries and eight security requirements, demonstrates that current frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP) fail to meet these standards, and presents an authorization broker that blocks all identified threats with minimal overhead. The broker is shown to resist numerous attacks and limits compromised sub‑agents to their delegated tasks, and its principles are implemented in VotalAI’s LLM Shield.

By Panduranga Sai Varma Dantuluri, Jyotirmoy Sundi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

NetInjectBench: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injection in Tool-Using Large Language Model Agents for Network Operations

arXiv:2607. 10490v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents are attractive for network operations, but tickets, alerts, logs, runbooks, and ChatOps messages can carry indirect prompt injections.

By Ruksat Khan Shayoni, Muhammad Faraz Shoaib, S M Asif Hossain, M. F. Mridha