The paper reports a non‑systematic audit of 39 external sources up to August 16, 2026, and targeted updates through October 14, examining the incremental security and utility impact of consuming a file named /llms.txt while keeping ordinary retrieval constant. A 15‑tool study found no automatic requests in 45 trials, and a log study showed that 97% of domains with detected files received no recorded requests in May 2026. A pilot with 24 tasks across eight sites and 120 real model responses identified attacker‑target adoption in 21 of 24 raw adversarial responses, while the URLs‑only condition had no known adoptions; the pilot measures output changes conditioned on supplied evidence without live retrieval or external actions.
arXiv:2605.29224v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents augment large language models with external tools such as web retrieval, enabling grounded and up-to-date responses. However, incor...
arXiv:2609.33676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents increasingly take consequential actions through interactions with users, policies, and external tools. Auditing these agents requires au...
arXiv:2608. 04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking.
arXiv:2604.08304v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path creates security ris...
arXiv:2604. 08304v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path also introduces security risks that existing work often conflates with inherent LLM flaws.
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...
arXiv:2609.37468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) interleaves reasoning with repeated retrieval, giving the retriever influence over both the evidence an...
The paper investigates how large language model (LLM) search agents can be manipulated through repeated, coordinated search-result injections, a threat that extends beyond single-page poisoning. It introduces Authority‑Chain Hijack (ACH), a strategy that chains manipulated evidence across multiple sources, achieving high attack success rates on the SafeSearch benchmark. The authors also present Trace‑Guided Strategy Evolution (TGSE), an automated method that refines attacker strategies using execution traces, further improving success rates.
TriShieldRAG introduces a three‑layered defense for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation: an Ingest Guard that screens documents, a Retrieval Scorer that re‑ranks based on trust, and a Cross‑LLM Consensus that validates evidence across three models. Against the original PoisonedRAG attack on the 2.68M‑passage Natural Questions corpus, the framework reduces attack success from about 79% to 1%. However, adaptive attacks that only alter document formatting can bypass the Ingest Guard and still achieve high success rates, revealing limits of layered defenses that rely on the same retrieved evidence.
arXiv:2406.00083v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant information from external knowledge bases t...
arXiv:2606. 02643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-enhanced LLM systems, while powerful, introduce substantial inference costs due to the inclusion of an extra multi-stage pipeline that dynamically retrieves and synthesizes information from external knowledge sources.
arXiv:2603. 22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface.