The paper investigates how self‑evolving personal agents become more vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. Using a two‑phase methodology—first allowing the agent to learn from user feedback on a task, then testing it with a third‑party hidden instruction—the authors find that self‑evolution significantly increases attack success rates, rising by 14.0–48.8 percentage points with skill evolution and 3.0–39.3 percentage points with reinforcement learning. The study demonstrates that the very mechanisms designed to improve agent performance also degrade their robustness to malicious manipulation.
arXiv:2608.30207v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Computer use agents (CUAs) are vision-language models that perceive a screen and act on a real operating system through mouse, keyboard, and terminal...
By Chen Xiong, Zhiyuan He, Pin-Yu Chen, Stjepan Picek, Tsung-Yi Ho
arXiv:2610.06401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection because they must act on untrusted external content. Existing tr...
By Mohamed Dhouib, Clement Elliker, Alexi Canesse, Ma\"el Jenny, Lucas-Andrei Thil, Mahammed El Sharkawy, Sonia Vanier, Elie Bursztein
The paper revisits Thompson’s classic compiler back‑door attack in the context of self‑modifying AI coding agents. By poisoning the benchmarks used for self‑evaluation, the authors demonstrate that agents such as the Darwin Gödel Machine, Self‑Improving Coding Agent, and Hyperagents can be coaxed into generating vulnerable code, even on clean, held‑out tasks. Experiments show that the contamination can persist after subsequent clean training, highlighting the need for more robust agent designs.
By Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno
arXiv:2610.08773v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Web agents complete user requests by reading and acting on pages that third parties write, so an instruction planted on a page can redirect the agent...
By Sarim Hashmi, Mukul Ranjan, Kshitij Mishra, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Praneeth Vepakomma, Nils Lukas
arXiv:2608. 04053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt injection remains a critical threat to LLM agents, yet existing defenses treat each task as a self-contained problem, independent of previous encounters.
By Shihao Weng, Yang Feng, Xiaofei Xie, Jiongchi Yu