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 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. 24343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-model agents act through structured tool calls whose arguments carry different risks.
By Md Ashikur Rahman, Md Arifur Rahman, Niamul Hassan Samin, Khandaker Rifah Tasnia, Sifat Rahman Ahona, Juena Ahmed Noshin
The paper introduces skilder, a framework that organizes LLM agent capabilities into role‑scoped bundles of skills, tools, and instructions, with explicit limits. Agents start with a minimal role catalog, discover the roles needed for a task, and receive the associated tools only through a single MCP server, ensuring deterministic enforcement of scope. Experiments on 13 tasks with six models show that skilder’s authorization layer prevents unauthorized tool calls and parameter violations while maintaining flexibility through dynamic cross‑role capability acquisition.
By Michael Stettler, Benjamin Girardet, Jonas Canton, Nicolas Corod
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
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
Language-model agents act through structured tool calls whose arguments carry different risks. Untrusted content may safely influence an email body but should not determine a recipient, account, command, or credential.
arXiv:2609.37454v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Underwriters in commercial Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance spend 30 to 40% of their time on administrative work rather than risk judgment, and a...
By Vivek Kumar Singh, Gautam Bhowmick
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. 26542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tool-using agents increasingly operate in open-ended deployment environments, where they compose file systems, web APIs, code interpreters, and enterprise services at runtime.
By Xiaochong Jiang, Shiqi Yang, Ziwei Li, Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Yichen Liu
arXiv:2609.00052v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Commercial LLM APIs advertise a specific foundation model, but the served backbone may be silently substituted, quantized, or wrapped, for example to...
By Xun Wang, Bihe Zhao, Michael Backes, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic
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