arXiv AI

Assessing Automated Prompt Injection Attacks in Agentic Environments

arXiv:2606. 10525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection poses a critical threat to LLM agents that interact with untrusted external data, yet automated attack methods--proven effective for jailbreaking--remain underexplored in realistic agentic settings.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Claudini: Autoresearch Discovers State-of-the-Art Adversarial Attack Algorithms for LLMs

arXiv:2603. 24511v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that AI agents are capable of discovering novel algorithms for adversarial attacks against LLMs, advancing the state of the art on white-box jailbreaking and prompt injection evaluations.

By Alexander Panfilov, Peter Romov, Igor Shilov, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Jonas Geiping, Maksym Andriushchenko
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
3d ago

Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMs

The paper investigates how inference optimization for large language models can introduce numerical inconsistencies that trigger hidden backdoors. It introduces two types of optimization‑triggered backdoors: the Input‑Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) and the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB), the latter enabling a model to remain benign under normal execution but activate a backdoor when optimization is applied. Experiments on seven open‑source LLMs, across multiple tasks and optimization backends, show UOB can achieve up to 100% attack success while maintaining clean accuracy, and the authors propose three defenses that reduce the attack success rate to 0.02.

By Yifei Wang, Yida Yang, Tianlin Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Li Pan
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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time. We ask whether a defender can recover such a trigger under realistic affordances, namely white-box access to the weights and knowledge of the behavior of concern, but no training data, no trusted reference model, no knowledge of the trigger, and no certainty that the model is poisoned.