arXiv AI

PROVISO: Provenance-Informed Action Selection for Secure LLM Agents

PROVISO is a controller that selects which action an LLM agent should commit after the agent proposes an action and before execution. It encodes trusted and external observations, the proposed action, and an alternative into provenance-typed memory, uses role‑specific queries to relate them, and commits the action with the highest calibrated value learned from outcomes. In four agent security tasks, PROVISO outperforms all baselines in both security and utility, improving F1 by 13.84 points on SkillsBench and 7.07 points on ToolSafe, and achieving 88–99 F1 on three additional skill detection benchmarks.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

When Tool Outputs Become Commands: Separating Action Induction from Runtime Authorization in Tool-Augmented LLM Agents

The paper introduces SARA, a framework that separates action induction from runtime authorization in tool‑augmented LLM agents. By treating these as distinct roles, SARA uses an Action Probe to record action provenance and only authorizes tool calls that align with the user objective and past successful executions. Experiments on AgentDojo and AgentDyn show that SARA reduces action‑to‑side‑effect risk to below 0.63% while preserving task performance.

By Xiaokun Guo, Zhen Xu, Dongdong Huo, Yanqiu Zhang, Wei Wang, Qinfu Yang, Dongjin Yu, Yu Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

PACE: Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement for Tool-Using LLM Agents

The paper introduces PACE, a Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement system designed to secure tool-using large language model agents by mediating every tool call before execution. PACE employs path confinement to limit influence paths and verifies effects against authenticated authority, distinguishing certified execution contracts from evaluated configurations. Experiments on eight agent‑security benchmarks show that the evaluated configuration reduces attack success in most cases while maintaining near‑native utility.

By Fengpeng Li, Qizhou Wang, Yuke Hu, Kemou Li, Jun Liu, Haiwei Wu, Jiantao Zhou, Di Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 23

ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation

ActGov is a runtime enforcement framework that validates each action proposed by a large language model (LLM) agent before it interacts with external tools, ensuring that actions stay within task‑scoped authorization boundaries and comply with dynamically constructed policies. It builds policies from tool specifications, benign tasks, and failure traces, verifying updates via SMT‑based counterexample checking. In evaluations on AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks, ActGov consistently reduces indirect prompt‑injection attack success while maintaining task utility, outperforming existing defenses.

By Kaiyuan Zhang, Yuke Peng, Ke Jiang, Yinqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Chaining Skills to Hijack LLM Agents

The paper "Chaining Skills to Hijack LLM Agents" introduces APEX, a method that constructs adversarial skill chains to manipulate large language model agents into performing attacker-selected actions. By exploiting the sequential invocation of open-source skills, APEX creates a record of genuine task progress that falsely signals user approval, enabling downstream skills to carry out malicious actions. Experiments on SkillsBench and GPT‑5.4 show high success rates, and a prompting defense reduces but does not eliminate the threat.

By Tian Dong, Zixuan Ma, Haodong Zhao, Huaien Zhang, Shaofeng Li, Hao Chen