arXiv AI

Beyond the Mandate: A Systematic Security Analysis of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

The paper presents a systematic security analysis of Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) version 2.0, focusing on its roles, transaction lifecycle, and deployment architectures. It identifies 48 threats across five attack families, scores them with the AIVSS, and demonstrates eight high‑risk threats with proof‑of‑concept attacks and mitigations. The study also introduces a deployment‑aware scanner to map threats to various checks, showing that signed mandates alone cannot guarantee user intent when pre‑authorization context is manipulated.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

A Formal Analysis of Agent Payment Protocols

The paper presents a formal analysis of four agent payment protocols—x402, MPP, ACP, and AP2—using the Tamarin prover. By modeling each protocol’s roles, state, and trust assumptions, the authors verify 86 cases, reproducing 46 known results and uncovering 40 new formal-consistency findings. They further validate ten findings through implementation proofs of concept, SDK/schema witnesses, and executable traces, highlighting the importance of consistent delegated authorization across all protocol stages.

By Ke Jiang, Mohan Yu, Yuan Chang, Mohit Kumar Jangid, Jianyu Niu, Cong Wang, Yinqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 16

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

arXiv:2602. 09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf.

By Georgios Syros, Evan Rose, Brian Grinstead, Christoph Kerschbaumer, William Robertson, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Alina Oprea
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
arXiv AI
Jun 12

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

arXiv:2606. 12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising.

By Md Jafrin Hossain, Mohammad Arif Hossain, Weiqi Liu, Nirwan Ansari
arXiv AI
Oct 27

The Agent in the Middle: How AI-Mediated Access Reshapes Web Vulnerability Exploitation

The paper examines how AI agents that interact directly with web service backends alter the exploitation of existing web vulnerabilities. Using the VELA benchmark, which includes 44 vulnerabilities across twelve application families, the authors evaluate three commercial agents and find that exploitability is largely determined by the interface design rather than the agent itself, with 91% of vulnerabilities remaining exploitable under the reference configuration. Interface restrictions can reduce attack success, yet the agents generally do not introduce new failures, and in some cases even complete attacks that users omitted.

By Ruozhao Yang, Jiongchi Yu, Ming Hu, Xiaofei Xie
arXiv AI
Jun 12

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606. 12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources.

By Pengfei He, Lesly Miculicich, Vishesh Sharma, Ash Fox, George Lee, Jiliang Tang, Tomas Pfister, Long T. Le
arXiv AI
Sep 23

When the Agent Becomes the Kernel: A Systematization of Security on the Path to AI-Native Operating Systems

The paper discusses how large language model agents now act as privileged principals with kernel‑grade authority, yet lack the trusted mediation traditionally required for operating‑system security. It introduces a taxonomy that distinguishes between provenance‑based deterministic checks and content‑semantic checks, identifying a central mediation gap in distinguishing data from instruction and authorized from unauthorized actions. The authors argue that this gap creates an irreducible risk of undetected attacks whenever inputs and actions are not pre‑enumerated, and they propose defenses across runtime monitoring, architectural separation, and authorization while critiquing current evaluation practices. They extend the analysis to AI‑native operating systems where the model itself serves as the arbitration core, outlining design constraints, challenges, and a research agenda.

By Li Zhang, Yang Sun, Jie Shi
arXiv AI
Jun 2

AgentRedBench: Dynamic Redteaming and Integration-Aware Defense for LLM Agents over SaaS Integrations

arXiv:2606. 02240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection in tool-use agents is a concrete production threat: LLM agents read from integrations (third-party services such as Gmail, Salesforce, or Jira accessed through tool calls) whose response content the user neither writes nor controls.

By Hiskias Dingeto, Will Leeney
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