Proof‑Gated Signing (PGS) is a method for securing on‑chain AI agents that control wallets by simulating proposed transactions, extracting their effects, and using an SMT solver to verify a declarative value‑and‑permission policy across a range of oracle‑uncertainty prices. PGS then compiles on‑chain post‑conditions—such as wallet balance bounds, payee receipts, allowance caps, and ownership checks—ensuring that any execution satisfying these conditions also satisfies the policy, even when the chain state drifts due to front‑running, contract upgrades, or token‑parameter changes. In a testbed of 260 scenarios, PGS prevented 93.6 % of harmful cases and passed 97.5 % of benign ones, outperforming simulation‑only checking and static allowlists, while incurring about 41 k gas and 0.1–0.2 s per check.
By Bravish Ghosh
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)
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:2607. 25364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using agents expose structured calls but commonly attach free-form rationales.
By Genliang Zhu (Accentrust, Georgia Institute of Technology), Chu Wang (Accentrust, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.
By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv:2606. 09549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents face two distinct security failures: unauthorized external actions and exposure of sensitive plaintext inside the runtime before any final output check can intervene.
By Yuhan Ma, Stefan Schmid
The paper introduces BSC‑R, a deterministic effect‑boundary mechanism that ties a single‑use commit authorization to the specific action and the semantic state that justified it, aiming to close the proposal‑to‑commit gap in tool‑using language‑model agents. Experiments on 2,847 AgentDojo episodes and 10,302 frozen proposals show that BSC‑R preserves the agent’s original behavior while rejecting unauthorized changes, and further tests on a boundary‑drift experiment and the CONTINUITY suite demonstrate high success rates in valid contexts and robust handling of replay and ambiguous cases. However, broader testing reveals that BSC‑R still allows a 25% invalid‑effect commit rate in a larger attack set, indicating that it provides scoped, not universal, safety.
By Wesley Shu
arXiv:2607. 05397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent systems increasingly execute rather than advise.
By James Rhodes, George Kang
arXiv:2606. 31023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hard-constrained sequential decision systems have no certified way to spend the test-time compute of modern AI: executing the multi-step drafts of a learned policy or a frozen LLM forfeits the feasibility guarantee a trusted solver provides, while invoking the solver at every step forfeits the speed the AI offers.
By Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou
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:2605. 17909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous agentic systems scale across regulated critical infrastructures, the lack of mechanistic, hardware-rooted enforcement for high-frequency policy updates presents a fundamental safety gap.
By Riddhi Mohan Sharma
The paper introduces Aegis, a runtime governance system for agentic AI that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision layer before tool execution. Aegis evaluates proposals against active policy, resolves provenance server‑side, fails closed under uncertainty, and routes selected cases through a Senate‑style settlement process. In a sandbox evaluation across 6,300 rows, Aegis prevented all governed mock‑tool applications and risky side‑effect completions, preserving provenance and quorum evidence for all settled cases.
By Adam Mazzocchetti