We present nsfaguard, a guardrail framework for securing agentic AI systems against operational threats, such as prompt injection, sensitive information extraction, malicious code requests, dangerous tool misuse, and resource exhaustion. We first introduce the NSFA taxonomy, which organizes 185 risk variants into a CIA-triad-grounded hierarchy and is cross-validated against three well-established OWASP guidelines.
arXiv:2604. 15579v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: There is increasing interest in integrating AI agents that invoke tools into domain-specific commercial software, where unintended tool calls can cause serious security and safety incidents.
By Yining Hong, Yining She, Eunsuk Kang, Christopher S. Timperley, Christian K\"astner
The paper introduces COLAGUARD, a guardrail model that embeds multi-step safety reasoning into a continuous latent space, allowing efficient hidden-state propagation during inference. Compared to existing methods, COLAGUARD achieves an 8.24‑point macro‑F1 improvement over Llama Guard 3 and matches the explicit reasoning baseline GuardReasoner, while delivering a 12.9× speedup and a 22.4× reduction in token usage across ten moderation settings and eight safety benchmarks.
By Siddharth Sai, Xiaofei Wen, Muhao Chen
arXiv:2607. 06326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed in open-world applications require safety guardrails that are both robust to complex risks and efficient enough for low-latency runtime moderation.
By He Liu, Changtao Miao, Xinjie Yang, Tianle Song, Yin Wu, Junchi Chen, Bintao He, Xinyuan Zhang, Bo Zhang, Shi Yan, Wei Lu, Wei Wang, Danyang Xu, Jiansheng Cai, Zhe Li
StepGuard introduces a step-level guard model that audits and checks tool actions before execution, addressing security risks in LLM-based agents. It is trained using StepGen, an automatic engine that generates safe and unsafe trajectories, and employs Balance-GRPO to dynamically balance learning between safe and unsafe actions. Experiments show StepGuard achieves high accuracy comparable to GPT-5.4 and significantly reduces attack success rates while minimally impacting utility.
By Zhijie Zheng, Yu Li, Chen Qian, Yuqian Fu, Yanwei Fu, Lu Sheng, Jing Shao, Dongrui Liu
arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
By Shawn Li, Yue Zhao
The paper introduces Trustworthy RAG, an evaluation agent designed to detect misinformation and knowledge poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. It combines natural language inference verification, a five-signal poison detector, and a weighted Trust Index to assess the reliability of retrieved content. Experiments on multiple LLMs show high accuracy and precision, with the agent effectively blocking unsafe advice in a secure-coding assistant scenario.
By Balkrishna Giri, Md Toufique Hasan, Jussi Rasku, Muhammad Waseem, Pekka Abrahamsson
arXiv:2607. 02121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic systems become integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their safety and security is critical.
By William Hackett, Peter Garraghan
arXiv:2604. 06550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills combine natural-language instructions with executable code while inheriting an agent's filesystem, credential, and network access.
By Yinghan Hou, Zongyou Yang
arXiv:2606. 14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents.
By Yuguang Zhou, Xunguang Wang, Pingchuan Ma, Zhantong Xue, Zhaoyu Wang, Shuai Wang
arXiv:2609.14593v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Living-Off-the-Land (LOTL) is the dominant evasion technique of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors, exploiting legitimate Windows utilities to c...
By Ahad Bin Islam Shoeb, Kamrul Hasan, Jamal Uddin Tanvin, Liang Hong, Imtiaz Ahmed, Md Arif Billah, Al Amin
arXiv:2609.23894v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agentic AI extends LLM security beyond generated content to persistent state, autonomous actions, tool use, and interactions with humans and other ag...
By Heewon Baek, Alsharif Abuadbba, Kristen Moore, Hyoungshick Kim, Surya Nepal