arXiv:2508.14925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: By providing a standardized interface for LLM agents to interact with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a...
By Zhiqiang Wang, Yichao Gao, Yanting Wang, Suyuan Liu, Haifeng Sun, Haoran Cheng, Guanquan Shi, Haohua Du, Xiangyang Li
arXiv:2609.14987v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents interact with external environments through tool invocation, but tool outputs can also expose them to indirect prom...
By Bingzheng Wang, Xiaoyan Gu, Wentao Wang, Xingyou Yang, Hongcheng Li, Rong Yin
arXiv:2509. 25624v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As LLMs advance into autonomous agents with tool-use capabilities, they introduce security challenges that extend beyond traditional content-based LLM safety concerns.
By Jing-Jing Li, Jianfeng He, Chao Shang, Devang Kulshreshtha, Xun Xian, Yi Zhang, Hang Su, Sandesh Swamy, Yanjun Qi
The paper introduces no‑box vulnerability analysis, a method that detects security flaws without system access or runtime interaction by examining only the functionality metadata of a target. Using this approach, the authors built MCPSEC to audit Model Context Protocol servers for indirect prompt injection vulnerabilities, evaluating it on 20 servers with 177 tools. MCPSEC identified 143 vulnerable tools, achieving 98.9% recall of verified vulnerabilities, outperforming an LLM baseline.
By Zehua Zhang, Jie Hu, Pratham Hegde, Aditya Maheshbhai Gabani, Souradip Nath, Yibo Liu, Siyu Liu, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Zhuoer Lyu, Chang Zhu, Divij Handa, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Adam Doupe
arXiv:2607. 25297v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language model (LLM) agents has enabled their broad adoption across diverse real-world tasks.
By Ping He, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Shouling Ji
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:2609.13889v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Harness design has transformed the development of LLM-based agents by integrating memory, tool use, and runtime control. However, this design also in...
By Shuhuai Huang, Jingfeng Zhang, Hong Jia
arXiv:2607. 26791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly adopted in real-world security operations with access to host artifacts and command-line interfaces (CLIs), making it critical to thoroughly assess their security capabilities.
By Lehan Wang, Boli Chen, Ruixue Ding, Pengjun Xie, Jinwei Huang, Zhendong Liu, Shuo Wang, Tao Lei, Xin Ouyang, Xiaomeng Li
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
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.
By Mehrdad Rostamzadeh, Sidhant Narula, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Daniel Takabi
The paper proposes universal, tool‑based defenses for large language model agents that use external tools, addressing four types of adversarial attacks: direct and indirect prompt injection, memory poisoning, and backdoor attacks. Two main defenses are introduced: Attacker Tool Filtering, which uses anomaly detection to remove suspicious tools, and Normal Tool Recalling, which restores the agent’s original toolset before planning. The authors also add prompt‑based defenses such as Chain‑of‑Thought prompting and self‑reflection, and demonstrate that these methods dramatically lower attack success rates—often to 0%—across multiple open‑source and proprietary LLMs while maintaining or improving task performance.
By Xiaoyan Li, Yunli Wang
CIPL (Channel Inversion for Privacy Leakage) is a channel-aware framework designed to evaluate black-box privacy leakage in large language model agents. It models the leakage process through stages of sensitive source, selection, assembly, execution, observation, and extraction, assessing how selected sensitive units become attacker-recoverable outputs. Experiments across memory, retrieval, and tool-mediated targets, plus a live-agent case study, reveal that recoverability depends on factors beyond storage labels, such as observation surface, prompt alignment, retrieval depth, and provider behavior, and that a semantic audit can uncover disclosures missed by exact matching.
By Tao Huang, Guosen Wu, Guolong Zheng, Jiayang Meng, Chen Hou, Xu Yang, Xuechao Yang, Feng Xia