Structurally Close, Temporally Distant: Measuring Security Exposure in Long-Horizon LLM Agents

The paper introduces a provenance‑aware execution graph for long‑horizon LLM agents, defining influence distance (DI) as the shortest structural path from an untrusted source to a sensitive action. Compared to the traditional sequence distance (DT), DI is always less than or equal to DT, revealing a median gap of nine hops in 454 injection–sink pairs across multiple models and datasets. The study shows that most pairs exhibit a non‑zero gap, and a deterministic DI‑based gate can block attacks missed by a sequence‑only gate without extra benign blocking.

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• llms
• agents