arXiv Machine Learning By Guoqin Xiong, Shengtao Wen, Xiang Chen, Xinyi Zeng, Zhaoxin Fan, Wei Ye, Xiaofeng Cao, Sheng-Jun Huang

SecureGARD: Dynamic Ontology-Guided Governance for Secure Tool-Using LLM Agents

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SecureGARD is a dynamic ontology‑guided governance framework designed to secure tool‑using large language model agents. It grounds heterogeneous tool calls in a shared semantic representation, using an executable ontology combined with episode‑level task state to make deterministic ready, waiting, and forbidden decisions. The system evolves its ontology offline from verified training executions, ensuring logical consistency and protecting entailments, and achieves a 0% attack success rate across multiple benchmarks while improving task utility under attack.

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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
Jun 19

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606. 19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance.

By Anupam Joshi, Tim Finin, Karuna Pande Joshi, Lalana Kagal
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AgentKernel: The Trust-Native Agentic Operating System

AgentKernel proposes a trust‑native operating system for AI agents, arguing that current governance layers are insufficient because they share the same process trust boundary as the agents. The OS introduces a mandatory enforcement boundary organized into four pillars—Identity, Perception, Cognition, and Execution—each adapting classical OS security principles to address semantic‑level failures such as prompt injection, memory poisoning, and tool misuse. By wrapping the agent lifecycle in this structured, non‑bypassable framework, AgentKernel aims to provide a unified security layer that can enforce identity, input mediation, memory governance, and execution control across the entire agent lifecycle.

By Zhenhua Zou, Sheng Guo, Qiuyang Zhan, Lepeng Zhao, Shuo Li, Zhuotao Liu