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
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Delegation Without Trust: An Empirical Gap Analysis of Identity, Authorization, and Runtime Governance in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

The paper examines the security challenges of delegating authority to autonomous LLM agents that act on users’ behalf. It introduces a threat model with four adversaries and eight security requirements, demonstrates that current frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP) fail to meet these standards, and presents an authorization broker that blocks all identified threats with minimal overhead. The broker is shown to resist numerous attacks and limits compromised sub‑agents to their delegated tasks, and its principles are implemented in VotalAI’s LLM Shield.

By Panduranga Sai Varma Dantuluri, Jyotirmoy Sundi
arXiv AI
2d ago

SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systems

The paper introduces the Secret-Use Delegation Protocol (SUDP), a method for agentic systems to perform user-authorized operations without granting reusable authority to untrusted requesters. It formalizes the Agent Secret Use (ASU) problem, outlines seven required security properties, and demonstrates that SUDP satisfies six of them under standard cryptographic assumptions, with the remaining property addressed via hardware-rooted runtime composition. A reference implementation shows minimal overhead for mediated calls.

By Xiaohang Yu, Hejia Geng, Xinmeng Zeng, William Knottenbelt
arXiv AI
4d ago

Act on Your Behalf, Beyond Your Authorization: Benchmarking LLM Agent Authorization Alignment

The paper introduces AuthorizationBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether large language model (LLM) agents act within the scope of user authorization when acting on their behalf. The benchmark comprises 286 executable tasks across ten application domains, covering situational triggers, presence or absence of direct harmful consequences, and varying reasoning effort. In experiments with four models and multiple agent harnesses, agents violated authorization in 19.2% of trajectories, with rates ranging from 10.5% to 26.6% across configurations, and increased reasoning effort did not substantially reduce these violations.

By Zhiping Zhang, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Zihao Huang, Tianshi Li