arXiv AI

When Safety Checks Become Privacy Risks: A Privacy-Preserving Paradigm for LLM Agent Safety Auditing

The paper introduces a privacy‑preserving safety auditing paradigm for large language model agents that interact with online services via tool calls. It separates audit computation from plaintext access, using trusted representation construction, encrypted audit computation, and trusted decision interfaces to protect sensitive user data. The authors implement this paradigm in SealCall, which employs learned audit representations and CKKS‑based encrypted similarity computation, achieving a mean F1 score of 0.840 on 1,252 public binary candidates while maintaining plaintext audit decisions and completing encrypted scoring in 0.176 s.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Not to Break, but to Attest: Adversarial Probes for Privacy-Preserving LLM Verification

The paper introduces a privacy‑preserving zk‑SNARK audit framework that uses adversarial‑style probes to detect logit drift between an approved large language model and a modified deployment. It offers three probe families—token‑based (black‑box), embedding‑based (gray‑box), and stress probes (partial white‑box)—allowing users to balance sensitivity, access, and cost. Experiments across LLM architectures and GPU platforms show token‑based probes achieve the highest mean sensitivity while remaining practical in a black‑box setting, with Groth16 proving times scaling modestly from 1.02 to 1.78 seconds and constant proof size.

By Cameron Wilding, Mina Shaker, Fatemeh Ganji
arXiv AI
Sep 23

ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Certified in Theory, Broken in Practice: Assumption Gaps in Cryptographic Model Certification

arXiv:2607. 21839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning auditing protocols allow auditors to assess models for properties such as accuracy or fairness, without revealing their internals or training data.

By Carter Luck, Olive Franzese-McLaughlin, Elisaweta Masserova, Akira Takahashi, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Nicolas Papernot
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

RouteScan: A Non-Intrusive Approach to Auditing MoE LLMs Safety via Expert Routing Telemetry

RouteScan is a non‑intrusive auditing framework that detects harmful behavior in Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models by analyzing expert‑routing telemetry captured from GPU execution. It uses the number of active GPU threads during the prefilling phase as a micro‑architectural fingerprint to isolate cross‑domain risk indicators and precisely identify malicious prompts. Evaluations on four open‑source MoE LLMs show strong generalization with AUROC > 0.91 on unseen harmful domains, while privacy tests indicate that full prompts cannot be reliably recovered from aggregated telemetry.

By Bo Lv, Zhiheng Xu, KeDong Xiu, Ruyi Ding, Tianhang Zheng, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Mandato: Protocol-Level Enforcement of Digitally Signed Mandates on AI Agent Actions with Cryptographically Chained Audit Trails

arXiv:2608. 14074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly act on external systems through standardized tool-calling protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet no infrastructure layer constrains their actions to what a principal has verifiably authorized: authorization logic lives in application code, is neither signed nor independently auditable, and the resulting logs lack evidentiary value.

By Giovanni Racioppi