arXiv AI

OpenEvoShield: Dual Non-Stationary Continual Defense for Open-World Multi-Agent System Attacks

arXiv:2607. 19351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where adversaries inject malicious instructions through inter-agent communication to propagate harmful behaviors.

arXiv AI
Jun 26

Adaptive Evaluation of Out-of-Band Defenses Against Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 26479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work (2024 to 2026) has converged on a strategy for defending tool-using LLM agents against indirect prompt injection: rather than training the model to refuse malicious instructions, enforce security outside the model with a deterministic policy that mediates the agent's actions.

By Praneeth Narisetty, Shiva Nagendra Babu Kore, Uday Kumar Reddy Kattamanchi, Jayaram Kumarapu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 13

Defending against Adaptive Prompt Injection Attacks via Reasoning-enabled Task Alignment

Indirect prompt injection attacks hijack LLM-based agents by embedding malicious instructions in third-party data that the agent retrieves during task execution. Existing defenses report near-zero attack success rate on static benchmarks, yet recent adaptive evaluations show that these results collapse once the attacker is allowed to optimize against the deployed defense.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

DriftNet: A Dual-Head Trajectory Transformer for Detecting and Localizing Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

DriftNet is a dual‑head trajectory Transformer designed to detect and localize prompt injection attacks in large language model agents. It processes logged tool‑call trajectories, classifying each as compromised or not while labeling every step as benign, injection point, hijacked, or failed injection. On the AgentDrift benchmark, DriftNet achieves high accuracy, with an F1 score of 0.983, 98.7% exact injection‑point recovery, and low false‑alarm rates.

By Asif Pinjari, Mithun Paul Saint-Germain
arXiv AI
Sep 24

When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.

By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons.