arXiv AI

ShareLock: A Stealthy Multi-Tool Threshold Poisoning Attack Against MCP

arXiv:2606. 27027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid evolution of LLM-driven agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol bridging LLMs with external tools, has quickly become foundational to modern agent ecosystems.

arXiv AI
Sep 12

No-Box Vulnerability Analysis: Description-only Detection of Indirect Prompt Injection Vulnerabilities in MCP Servers

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 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
Jul 31

SecRespond: Benchmarking AI Agents for Real-World Post-Compromise Incident Response

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 AI
Jun 18

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

TrustShiftProbe: Characterizing, Benchmarking, and Defending Staged Trust Attacks on MCP Servers

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
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Universal Defenses for Tool-Integrated LLM Agents Against Adversarial Attacks

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
arXiv AI
Sep 21

CIPL: A Channel-Aware Framework for Recoverable Privacy Leakage in LLM Agents

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