arXiv AI

Permission Denied: Policy-Graded Evaluation of Coding Agents in Hardened Environments

arXiv:2608. 02670v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents increasingly run inside organizations whose security controls (scoped credentials, restricted egress, read-only filesystems, non-root execution) constrain them like any other software.

arXiv AI
Oct 19

From Approval to Abuse: Privilege Escalation Attacks on Harness-Protected Coding Agents

The paper "From Approval to Abuse: Privilege Escalation Attacks on Harness-Protected Coding Agents" examines how coding agents that use execution harnesses to enforce permission boundaries can be tricked into granting overly broad allow-rules. By planting adversarial context in a repository, attackers can steer an agent into requesting a plausibly justified yet dangerously wide permission, which, if approved, lets the agent bypass the harness and execute malicious actions without further human oversight. Experiments on platforms such as Claude Code and Codex CLI show that 58% of trials succeed in eliciting such rules, which then cover 56.9% of category-specific capability tests and enable silent goal completion in 81% of approved cases, thereby undermining the safety promise of human-in-the-loop oversight.

By Xianglin Yang, Yechao Zhang, Jiahao Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuxin Cao, Bryan Hooi, Jiaheng Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv:2510. 01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings.

By Shoumik Saha, Jifan Chen, Sam Mayers, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Zijian Wang, Varun Kumar
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Runtime Governance for Agentic AI: Action-Boundary Control with Trusted Provenance and Fail-Closed Execution

The paper introduces Aegis, a runtime governance system for agentic AI that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision layer before tool execution. Aegis evaluates proposals against active policy, resolves provenance server‑side, fails closed under uncertainty, and routes selected cases through a Senate‑style settlement process. In a sandbox evaluation across 6,300 rows, Aegis prevented all governed mock‑tool applications and risky side‑effect completions, preserving provenance and quorum evidence for all settled cases.

By Adam Mazzocchetti