arXiv AI

From Privacy to Workflow Integrity: Communication-Graph Metadata in Autonomous Agent Interoperability

arXiv:2606. 07150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent-interoperability protocols such as A2A and MCP standardize what agents say to one another, but assume address-based transport over HTTP(S).

arXiv AI
Sep 15

When Tool Calls Succeed but Workflows Fail: Anomalies at the Agent-Tool Boundary

The paper investigates how AI agents that run long workflows using external tools can experience inconsistencies when retries, speculative execution, concurrency, or partial failures occur. It introduces an effect‑history model that distinguishes between actual external events and the agent’s observations, and catalogs eight common external‑effect anomalies. The authors analyze the standard Model Context Protocol tool interface, finding that its annotations are too coarse to fully express the necessary capabilities to prevent these anomalies, thereby motivating the need for reusable transactional contracts at the agent‑tool boundary.

By Artem Trofimov, Boris Novikov
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Attested Tool-Server Admission: A Security Extension to the Model Context Protocol

arXiv:2605. 24248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how a large-language-model (LLM) agent and an external tool server exchange messages, but not trust: a host reads a server's self-declared tool list and dispatches calls, with no notion of which servers it may use, at what sensitivity, or which of a server's tools are in bounds.

By Alfredo Metere
arXiv AI
Aug 26

TrustShiftProbe: Characterizing, Benchmarking, and Defending Staged Trust Attacks on MCP Servers

The paper introduces TrustShiftProbe, a framework that characterizes and defends against staged trust attacks on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. It defines a temporal threat model where a compromised server behaves benignly during conditioning and later delivers adversarial payloads, and presents a multi‑tier runtime defense called SHIELD that reduces attack success from 69.5% to 42.7%. The work also provides a taxonomy of nine TrustShift variants across different execution mechanisms and objectives.

By Mehrdad Rostamzadeh, Sidhant Narula, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Daniel Takabi