arXiv AI

Where You Inject Matters: The Trust Region Effect in LLM Agents

The paper investigates how the location of malicious instructions—known as indirect prompt injections—affects the vulnerability of large language model agents. By testing agents across tool use, coding, and daily workflow scenarios, the authors discover a "trust region effect," where agents are more likely to follow unsafe instructions placed in certain environmental surfaces, such as README files, than in others. They also develop learning-based attackers that optimize both injection content and placement, demonstrating that both factors significantly influence attack success.

arXiv AI
Oct 16

INFUSE: A Unified Surface Benchmark for Indirect Prompt Injection in Agentic Systems

INFUSE is a new benchmark that tests indirect prompt injection (IPI) in large‑language‑model agents performing long‑horizon workflows. It contains 40 realistic tasks and 56 attack scenarios across five threat categories, with attacks injected through realistic interaction surfaces rather than just initial prompts. The study evaluated 19 LLMs, generating over 41,000 adversarial trajectories and found mean attack success rates of 19.6% (LLM evaluation) and 15.4% (heuristic verification), while prompt‑level hardening reduced success from 58.2% to 14.3%.

By Thuy Dung Nguyen, Jingyi Guo, Rana Seda Dubauskas, Sreepriya Damuluru, Taylor T. Johnson, Kevin Leach
arXiv AI
Jun 12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606. 13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences.

By Zihao Wang, Yiming Li, Yutong Wu, Zheyu Liu, Kangjie Chen, Fok Kar Wai, Pin-Yu Chen, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing, Bo Li, Dacheng Tao, Tianwei Zhang