The paper examines the security challenges of delegating authority to autonomous LLM agents that act on users’ behalf. It introduces a threat model with four adversaries and eight security requirements, demonstrates that current frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP) fail to meet these standards, and presents an authorization broker that blocks all identified threats with minimal overhead. The broker is shown to resist numerous attacks and limits compromised sub‑agents to their delegated tasks, and its principles are implemented in VotalAI’s LLM Shield.
By Panduranga Sai Varma Dantuluri, Jyotirmoy Sundi
The paper introduces PACE, a Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement system designed to secure tool-using large language model agents by mediating every tool call before execution. PACE employs path confinement to limit influence paths and verifies effects against authenticated authority, distinguishing certified execution contracts from evaluated configurations. Experiments on eight agent‑security benchmarks show that the evaluated configuration reduces attack success in most cases while maintaining near‑native utility.
By Fengpeng Li, Qizhou Wang, Yuke Hu, Kemou Li, Jun Liu, Haiwei Wu, Jiantao Zhou, Di Wang
The paper introduces PACE (Policy‑Attested Contract Execution), a framework that sits between large‑language‑model (LLM) based autonomous AI agents and on‑chain DeFi operations. PACE defines typed transaction intents, a deterministic policy verifier, and signed Policy Decision Records (PDRs) that cryptographically bind an approved intent, policy, and simulation report to the exact on‑chain execution bytes, providing replay and expiration protection. In evaluations across 40 tasks and six baselines, PACE achieves zero unsafe executions and zero false positives, outperforming unguarded agents by a large margin.
By Rabimba Karanjai (Larry), Yang Lu (Larry), Richard Williamson (Larry), Hemanth Hm (Larry), Prakhar Mehrotra (Larry), Lei Xu (Larry), Weidong (Larry), Shi
arXiv:2607. 10487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can commit durable effects from authority evidence that was valid earlier in execution: a DOM snapshot, approval epoch, version witness, branch token, or worker result.
By Igor Santos-Grueiro
arXiv:2609.14744v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: By acquiring compute, credentials, accounts, services, and other agents, autonomous AI agents can introduce new authority into a task. Payment, bud...
By Genliang Zhu (Accentrust, Georgia Institute of Technology), Chu Wang (Accentrust, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
arXiv:2605. 18414v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly operate as autonomous agents that select and invoke tools from large registries.
By Rohith Uppala
ActGov is a runtime enforcement framework that validates each action proposed by a large language model (LLM) agent before it interacts with external tools, ensuring that actions stay within task‑scoped authorization boundaries and comply with dynamically constructed policies. It builds policies from tool specifications, benign tasks, and failure traces, verifying updates via SMT‑based counterexample checking. In evaluations on AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks, ActGov consistently reduces indirect prompt‑injection attack success while maintaining task utility, outperforming existing defenses.
By Kaiyuan Zhang, Yuke Peng, Ke Jiang, Yinqian Zhang
AcquireBound is a runtime authorization framework that ensures AI agents can safely acquire and activate resources such as compute, credentials, and services. It quarantines acquired outputs, resolves their capabilities through authenticated evidence, and activates them only after verifying a manifest, provenance, and relational constraints. The system demonstrates strong safety properties, passing extensive benign and unsafe trace tests across multiple resource classes.
By Genliang Zhu
arXiv:2609.21284v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-running AI agents outlive initiating processes through credentials, delegated tasks, queues, callbacks, reservations, and provider-side operatio...
By Genliang Zhu, Chu Wang
The paper introduces CONTINUITY, a framework that ensures secure composition of large language model (LLM) agent controls by using assume‑guarantee contracts and authenticated security contexts. It models each component with signed root grants, provenance commitments, and other mechanisms to carry security context across transitions, formalizing end‑to‑end consequence integrity. A reference verifier and fault‑injection suite demonstrate that the full configuration prevents harmful effects while completing all benign tasks and correctly escalating ambiguous cases.
By Chris Zheng, Geng Yang
arXiv:2608.30091v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern agent frameworks compose planners, tool agents, remote services, and shared specialists into runtime delegation graphs, but their revocation API...
By Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang
arXiv:2609.22944v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autonomous AI agents increasingly act across organizational boundaries on behalf of human operators: they invoke third-party services, delegate subta...
By Oliver Aleksander Larsen, Mahyar Tourchi Moghaddam