arXiv AI

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 AI
Aug 19

HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety

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."

By Yajing Bai, Jinhao Duan, Jie Peng, Xianfeng Wu, Sijia Liu, Song Wang, Tianlong Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 12

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606. 13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross.

By Jiaqi Luo, Jiarun Dai, Zhile Chen, Jia Xu, Weibing Wang, Yawen Duan, Brian Tse, Geng Hong, Xudong Pan, Yuan Zhang, Min Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

A Blind Trust, the Bloody Thrust: When Attacker-Controlled Hook Updates Steer AI Agent Harnesses towards Malicious Behaviors

The paper reports a new attack surface in AI agent harnesses: lifecycle hooks that bind shell commands to runtime events. By updating only the hook configuration, an attacker can silently inject malicious commands into a benign plugin, enabling host‑side attacks such as privilege escalation. The authors present HookPry, an automated framework that demonstrates this vulnerability across 25 harness‑backend combinations, compromising all evaluated harnesses with high success rates.

By Pengxun Li, Litian Zhang, Jianwei Hou, Shujiang Wu, Song Li, Zifeng Kang, Xi Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team

The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems.

arXiv AI
Jun 12

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606. 12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources.

By Pengfei He, Lesly Miculicich, Vishesh Sharma, Ash Fox, George Lee, Jiliang Tang, Tomas Pfister, Long T. Le
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SeClaw: Spec-Driven Security Task Synthesis for Evaluating 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.

By Hao Cheng, Changtao Miao, Tianle Song, Yin Wu, He Liu, Erjia Xiao, Junchi Chen, Xiaoyu Shi, Yichi Wang, Jing Yang, Taowen Wang, Jinhao Duan, Mengshu Sun, Peiyan Dong, Xuan Shen, Yang Cao, Renjing Xu, Kaidi Xu, Jindong Gu, Bo Zhang, Jize Zhang, Chenhao Lin, Philip Torr, Chao Shen