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: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
LLM-based agents leverage third-party skills to extend their capabilities in open-world scenarios. However, third-party skills can introduce extra security vulnerabilities, as seemingly harmless skills can contain latent safety risks that only emerge during actual execution.
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It evaluates candidate skills against source evidence and nine safety properties, then tests them in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The system iteratively refines skills based on these results, achieving high precision in vulnerability detection and significantly improving task performance and security rates.
By Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
arXiv:2607. 20982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model agents increasingly operate autonomously with access to tools and external environments, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior becomes critical.
By Vishal Ishwar Naik, Chenyu Xu, Donna Dong, Hussein Hassan, Abhishek Pradhan, Ofer Mendelevitch, Tallat Shafat, Humayun Irshad
arXiv:2607. 29254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) with external tools, enabling them to perform complex tasks and translate model outputs into consequential real-world actions.
By Minghui Pan, Jiayuxuan Yang, Yuanyuan Yuan, Yu Jiang, Zhenpeng Chen
arXiv:2608. 02683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on multi-stage agentic workflows, with stages such as memory, planning, and tool execution, to accomplish complex tasks.
By Zibo Xiao, Haoyu Wang, Jun Sun
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It first checks functional claims against evidence and evaluates artifacts against nine safety properties, then tests admitted skills in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The approach achieves perfect precision and recall in vulnerability detection, significantly reduces attack success rates, and boosts task effectiveness and security rates in skill generation benchmarks.
arXiv:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
By Ismail Hossain, Sai Puppala, Zhuoran Lu, Sajedul Talukder, Nan Jiang
arXiv:2608. 10530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone a shift from stateless conversational interfaces to autonomous agents capable of multi-step planning, tool invocation, code execution, and maintaining persistent memory.
By Md Jafrin Hossain, Mohammad Arif Hossain, Nirwan Ansari
arXiv:2608. 08468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent Skills---structured packages of instructions and scripts that augment LLM-based agents---are rapidly proliferating, yet their security properties remain under-explored.
By Xinze Chen, Chi Zhang, Ping Ji, Yimin Liu
arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
By Shawn Li, Yue Zhao