arXiv AI
Sep 10

AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing

The paper introduces AgentLeak, a black‑box attack that clones the task‑solving capabilities of a strong LLM agent onto a weaker one by exploiting differences between successful and failed executions. Unlike prior skill‑stealing methods that only recover explicit skill artifacts, AgentLeak identifies and incorporates missing procedural behaviors, boosting task pass rates by over 40% and closing more than 80% of the capability gap across 20 scenarios. The study demonstrates that observable execution behavior can leak proprietary procedural knowledge, posing a confidentiality risk for LLM agents.

By Xiaoting Lyu, Yuhong Wu, Yufei Han, Shichang Liu, Liang Zhang, Bin Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaobo Ma, Wei Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 7

APEX: Active Protection at Execution Boundaries for LLM Agents

The paper introduces APEX, an active defense for large language model agents that protects against indirect prompt injection by enforcing safety at execution boundaries. APEX uses an evidence‑gated prevention contract and deception‑based exposure to ensure that only authorized effects, endorsed by the task, are executed. Evaluation shows APEX achieves near‑zero attack success across multiple benchmarks and capability‑unit types, outperforming 13 baseline defenses.

By Xinran Zheng, Xin Fan Guo, Zhiqiang Hao, Fan Yang, Xingzhi Qian, Jiawei Du, Jinfeng Xu, Zheng Xing, Shuo Yang, Xingjun Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

PACE: Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement for Tool-Using LLM Agents

The paper introduces PACE, a Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement system designed to secure tool-using large language model agents by mediating every tool call before execution. PACE employs path confinement to limit influence paths and verifies effects against authenticated authority, distinguishing certified execution contracts from evaluated configurations. Experiments on eight agent‑security benchmarks show that the evaluated configuration reduces attack success in most cases while maintaining near‑native utility.

By Fengpeng Li, Qizhou Wang, Yuke Hu, Kemou Li, Jun Liu, Haiwei Wu, Jiantao Zhou, Di Wang