arXiv AI

The Balkanization of Execution-Security Research for AI Coding Agents: Isolation, Access Control, and Time-of-Check-to-Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities

arXiv:2607. 05743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents now read repositories, call tools, and execute shell commands with limited human oversight, and a fast-growing body of work studies whether the execution layer around them is actually safe.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 28

Distributing Security Controls Through Harness Engineering

AI coding agents are being adopted at historic speed, yet security and risk concerns remain the primary barrier to scaling agentic AI across organizations. Existing security controls for coding agents are not systematically distributed to engineering teams, and vendor-native solutions introduce ecosystem dependencies that may not suit every deployment context.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Securing Multi-Tool AI Agent Chains With Dynamic, Real-Time Compositional Policies

arXiv:2607. 03423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agent implementations such as frontier coding agents chain multiple tools at runtime that create a security surface that per-tool guardrails are unable to address, as individually permitted tools can violate organizational policies when composed.

By Chris Schneider, Kriti Faujdar, Philipp Schoenegger, Ben Bariach
arXiv AI
Aug 19

HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety

HarnessRisk is a lifecycle-oriented benchmark for evaluating safety in agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, state, permissions, and external actions. It defines six operational phases—Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery—and includes 128 sandboxed cases pairing benign user objectives with adversarial instructions. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 configurations, attack success rates vary from 12.6% to 80.9%, with the most vulnerable phase being Harness Configuration. "whyItMatters":"The benchmark demonstrates that safety failures can arise in multiple harness responsibilities and that even explicit risk detection does not guarantee safe action, underscoring the need for comprehensive evaluation across model and harness configurations."

By Yajing Bai, Jinhao Duan, Jie Peng, Xianfeng Wu, Sijia Liu, Song Wang, Tianlong Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Runtime Governance for Agentic AI: Action-Boundary Control with Trusted Provenance and Fail-Closed Execution

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
arXiv AI
Aug 24

ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents

ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).

By Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng, Chang Jin, An Wang, Xiaokun Luan, Zhixiao Lin, Jingjing Qu, Xia Hu, Xingcheng Xu