Daily Papers

OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational privileges introduce critical security vulnerabilities, transforming model errors into tangible system-level threats such as sensitive data leakage, privilege escalation, and malicious third-party skill execution. Existing security measures for the OpenClaw ecosystem remain highly fragmented, addressing only isolated stages of the agent lifecycle rather than providing holistic protection. To bridge this gap, we present ClawKeeper, a real-time security framework that integrates multi-dimensional protection mechanisms across three complementary architectural layers. (1) Skill-based protection operates at the instruction level, injecting structured security policies directly into the agent context to enforce environment-specific constraints and cross-platform boundaries. (2) Plugin-based protection serves as an internal runtime enforcer, providing configuration hardening, proactive threat detection, and continuous behavioral monitoring throughout the execution pipeline. (3) Watcher-based protection introduces a novel, decoupled system-level security middleware that continuously verifies agent state evolution. It enables real-time execution intervention without coupling to the agent's internal logic, supporting operations such as halting high-risk actions or enforcing human confirmation. We argue that this Watcher paradigm holds strong potential to serve as a foundational building block for securing next-generation autonomous agent systems. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ClawKeeper across diverse threat scenarios. We release our code.

Modern large-scale language model pre-training relies heavily on the single program multiple data (SPMD) paradigm, which requires tight coupling across accelerators. Due to this coupling, transient slowdowns, hardware failures, and synchronization overhead stall the entire computation, wasting significant compute time at scale. While recent distributed methods like DiLoCo reduced communication bandwidth, they remained fundamentally synchronous and vulnerable to these system stalls. To address this, we introduce Decoupled DiLoCo, an evolution of the DiLoCo framework designed to break the lock-step synchronization barrier and go beyond SPMD to maximize training goodput. Decoupled DiLoCo partitions compute across multiple independent ``learners'' that execute local inner optimization steps. These learners asynchronously communicate parameter fragments to a central synchronizer, which circumvents failed or straggling learners by aggregating updates using a minimum quorum, an adaptive grace window, and dynamic token-weighted merging. Inspired by ``chaos engineering'', we achieve significantly improved training efficiency in failure-prone environments with millions of simulated chips with strictly zero global downtime, while maintaining competitive model performance across text and vision tasks, for both dense and mixture-of-expert architectures.

LLM-driven agentic applications increasingly automate complex, multi-step tasks, but serving them efficiently remains challenging due to heterogeneous components, dynamic and model-driven control flow, long-running state, and unpredictable latencies. Nalar is a ground-up agent-serving framework that cleanly separates workflow specification from execution while providing the runtime visibility and control needed for robust performance. Nalar preserves full Python expressiveness, using lightweight auto-generated stubs that turn agent and tool invocations into futures carrying dependency and context metadata. A managed state layer decouples logical state from physical placement, enabling safe reuse, migration, and consistent retry behavior. A two-level control architecture combines global policy computation with local event-driven enforcement to support adaptive routing, scheduling, and resource management across evolving workflows. Together, these mechanisms allow Nalar to deliver scalable, efficient, and policy-driven serving of heterogeneous agentic applications without burdening developers with orchestration logic. Across three agentic workloads, Nalar cuts tail latency by 34--74\%, achieves up to 2.9times speedups, sustains 80 RPS where baselines fail, and scales to 130K futures with sub-500 ms control overhead.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standardized interface enabling seamless integration between Large Language Models (LLMs) and external data sources and tools. While MCP significantly reduces development complexity and enhances agent capabilities, its openness and extensibility introduce critical security vulnerabilities that threaten system trustworthiness and user data protection. This paper systematically analyzes the security landscape of MCP-based systems, identifying three principal threat categories: (1) agent hijacking attacks stemming from protocol design deficiencies; (2) traditional web vulnerabilities in MCP servers; and (3) supply chain security. To address these challenges, we comprehensively survey existing defense strategies, examining both proactive server-side scanning approaches, ranging from layered detection pipelines and agentic auditing frameworks to zero-trust registry systems, and runtime interaction monitoring solutions that provide continuous oversight and policy enforcement. Our analysis reveals that MCP security fundamentally represents a paradigm shift where the attack surface extends from traditional code execution to semantic interpretation of natural language metadata, necessitating novel defense mechanisms tailored to this unique threat model.

Security experts reverse engineer (decompile) binary code to identify critical security vulnerabilities. The limited access to source code in vital systems - such as firmware, drivers, and proprietary software used in Critical Infrastructures (CI) - makes this analysis even more crucial on the binary level. Even with available source code, a semantic gap persists after compilation between the source and the binary code executed by the processor. This gap may hinder the detection of vulnerabilities in source code. That being said, current research on Large Language Models (LLMs) overlooks the significance of decompiled binaries in this area by focusing solely on source code. In this work, we are the first to empirically uncover the substantial semantic limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs when it comes to analyzing vulnerabilities in decompiled binaries, largely due to the absence of relevant datasets. To bridge the gap, we introduce DeBinVul, a novel decompiled binary code vulnerability dataset. Our dataset is multi-architecture and multi-optimization, focusing on C/C++ due to their wide usage in CI and association with numerous vulnerabilities. Specifically, we curate 150,872 samples of vulnerable and non-vulnerable decompiled binary code for the task of (i) identifying; (ii) classifying; (iii) describing vulnerabilities; and (iv) recovering function names in the domain of decompiled binaries. Subsequently, we fine-tune state-of-the-art LLMs using DeBinVul and report on a performance increase of 19%, 24%, and 21% in the capabilities of CodeLlama, Llama3, and CodeGen2 respectively, in detecting binary code vulnerabilities. Additionally, using DeBinVul, we report a high performance of 80-90% on the vulnerability classification task. Furthermore, we report improved performance in function name recovery and vulnerability description tasks.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models challenge serving infrastructures with dynamic, sparse expert utilization, causing instability on conventional systems designed for dense architectures. We propose EaaS, a novel serving system to enable efficient, scalable, and robust MoE deployment. Our system disaggregates MoE modules into independent, stateless services. This design enables fine-grained resource scaling and provides inherent fault tolerance by decoupling compute units. The architecture is powered by a high-performance, CPU-free peer-to-peer communication library that ensures minimal overhead and high throughput. Experiments confirm EaaS's scalability and efficiency, achieving performance comparable to monolithic systems while providing robust fault tolerance and strong scalability. EaaS incurs less than a 2% throughput reduction under simulated hardware failures that would otherwise halt monolithic architectures. It further saves up to 37.5% of computing resources through dynamic fine-grained adaptation to serving traffic, demonstrating strong resilience for large-scale MoE deployment in production.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in generating firmware for embedded systems, but often introduce security flaws and fail to meet real-time performance constraints. This paper proposes a three-phase methodology that combines LLM-based firmware generation with automated security validation and iterative refinement in a virtualized environment. Using structured prompts, models like GPT-4 generate firmware for networking and control tasks, deployed on FreeRTOS via QEMU. These implementations are tested using fuzzing, static analysis, and runtime monitoring to detect vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows (CWE-120), race conditions (CWE-362), and denial-of-service threats (CWE-400). Specialized AI agents for Threat Detection, Performance Optimization, and Compliance Verification collaborate to improve detection and remediation. Identified issues are categorized using CWE, then used to prompt targeted LLM-generated patches in an iterative loop. Experiments show a 92.4\% Vulnerability Remediation Rate (37.3\% improvement), 95.8\% Threat Model Compliance, and 0.87 Security Coverage Index. Real-time metrics include 8.6ms worst-case execution time and 195μs jitter. This process enhances firmware security and performance while contributing an open-source dataset for future research.

AI memory systems are evolving toward unified context layers that enable efficient cross-agent collaboration and multi-tool workflows, facilitating better accumulation of personal data and learning of user preferences. However, centralization creates a trust crisis where users must entrust cloud providers with sensitive digital memory data. We identify a core tension between personalization demands and data sovereignty: centralized memory systems enable efficient cross-agent collaboration but expose users' sensitive data to cloud provider risks, while private deployments provide security but limit collaboration. To resolve this tension, we aim to achieve local-equivalent security while enabling superior maintenance efficiency and collaborative capabilities. We propose a five-layer architecture abstracting common functional components of AI memory systems: Storage, Extraction, Learning, Retrieval, and Governance. By applying TEE protection to each layer, we establish a trustworthy framework. Based on this, we design MemTrust, a hardware-backed zero-trust architecture that provides cryptographic guarantees across all layers. Our contributions include the five-layer abstraction, "Context from MemTrust" protocol for cross-application sharing, side-channel hardened retrieval with obfuscated access patterns, and comprehensive security analysis. The architecture enables third-party developers to port existing systems with acceptable development costs, achieving system-wide trustworthiness. We believe that AI memory plays a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency and collaboration of agents and AI tools. AI memory will become the foundational infrastructure for AI agents, and MemTrust serves as a universal trusted framework for AI memory systems, with the goal of becoming the infrastructure of memory infrastructure.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a de facto standard for integrating Large Language Models with external tools, yet no formal security analysis of the protocol specification exists. We present the first rigorous security analysis of MCP's architectural design, identifying three fundamental protocol-level vulnerabilities: (1) absence of capability attestation allowing servers to claim arbitrary permissions, (2) bidirectional sampling without origin authentication enabling server-side prompt injection, and (3) implicit trust propagation in multi-server configurations. We implement MCPBench, a novel framework bridging existing agent security benchmarks to MCP-compliant infrastructure, enabling direct measurement of protocol-specific attack surfaces. Through controlled experiments on 847 attack scenarios across five MCP server implementations, we demonstrate that MCP's architectural choices amplify attack success rates by 23--41\% compared to equivalent non-MCP integrations. We propose MCPSec, a backward-compatible protocol extension adding capability attestation and message authentication, reducing attack success rates from 52.8\% to 12.4\% with median latency overhead of 8.3ms per message. Our findings establish that MCP's security weaknesses are architectural rather than implementation-specific, requiring protocol-level remediation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic control by enabling end-to-end decision-making directly from multimodal inputs. However, their tightly coupled architectures expose novel security vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional adversarial perturbations, backdoor attacks represent a stealthier, persistent, and practically significant threat-particularly under the emerging Training-as-a-Service paradigm-but remain largely unexplored in the context of VLA models. To address this gap, we propose BadVLA, a backdoor attack method based on Objective-Decoupled Optimization, which for the first time exposes the backdoor vulnerabilities of VLA models. Specifically, it consists of a two-stage process: (1) explicit feature-space separation to isolate trigger representations from benign inputs, and (2) conditional control deviations that activate only in the presence of the trigger, while preserving clean-task performance. Empirical results on multiple VLA benchmarks demonstrate that BadVLA consistently achieves near-100% attack success rates with minimal impact on clean task accuracy. Further analyses confirm its robustness against common input perturbations, task transfers, and model fine-tuning, underscoring critical security vulnerabilities in current VLA deployments. Our work offers the first systematic investigation of backdoor vulnerabilities in VLA models, highlighting an urgent need for secure and trustworthy embodied model design practices. We have released the project page at https://badvla-project.github.io/.

This paper identifies and analyzes a novel vulnerability class in Model Context Protocol (MCP) based agent systems. The attack chain describes and demonstrates how benign, individually authorized tasks can be orchestrated to produce harmful emergent behaviors. Through systematic analysis using the MITRE ATLAS framework, we demonstrate how 95 agents tested with access to multiple services-including browser automation, financial analysis, location tracking, and code deployment-can chain legitimate operations into sophisticated attack sequences that extend beyond the security boundaries of any individual service. These red team exercises survey whether current MCP architectures lack cross-domain security measures necessary to detect or prevent a large category of compositional attacks. We present empirical evidence of specific attack chains that achieve targeted harm through service orchestration, including data exfiltration, financial manipulation, and infrastructure compromise. These findings reveal that the fundamental security assumption of service isolation fails when agents can coordinate actions across multiple domains, creating an exponential attack surface that grows with each additional capability. This research provides a barebones experimental framework that evaluate not whether agents can complete MCP benchmark tasks, but what happens when they complete them too well and optimize across multiple services in ways that violate human expectations and safety constraints. We propose three concrete experimental directions using the existing MCP benchmark suite.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic, provides a standardized framework for artificial intelligence (AI) systems to interact with external data sources and tools in real-time. While MCP offers significant advantages for AI integration and capability extension, it introduces novel security challenges that demand rigorous analysis and mitigation. This paper builds upon foundational research into MCP architecture and preliminary security assessments to deliver enterprise-grade mitigation frameworks and detailed technical implementation strategies. Through systematic threat modeling and analysis of MCP implementations and analysis of potential attack vectors, including sophisticated threats like tool poisoning, we present actionable security patterns tailored for MCP implementers and adopters. The primary contribution of this research lies in translating theoretical security concerns into a practical, implementable framework with actionable controls, thereby providing essential guidance for the secure enterprise adoption and governance of integrated AI systems.

Agentic AI systems built around large language models (LLMs) are moving away from closed, single-model frameworks and toward open ecosystems that connect a variety of agents, external tools, and resources. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard to unify tool access, allowing agents to discover, invoke, and coordinate with tools more flexibly. However, as MCP becomes more widely adopted, it also brings a new set of security and privacy challenges. These include risks such as unauthorized access, tool poisoning, prompt injection, privilege escalation, and supply chain attacks, any of which can impact different parts of the protocol workflow. While recent research has examined possible attack surfaces and suggested targeted countermeasures, there is still a lack of systematic, protocol-level security improvements for MCP. To address this, we introduce the Secure Model Context Protocol (SMCP), which builds on MCP by adding unified identity management, robust mutual authentication, ongoing security context propagation, fine-grained policy enforcement, and comprehensive audit logging. In this paper, we present the main components of SMCP, explain how it helps reduce security risks, and illustrate its application with practical examples. We hope that this work will contribute to the development of agentic systems that are not only powerful and adaptable, but also secure and dependable.

Agentic systems built on large language models (LLMs) extend beyond text generation to autonomously retrieve information and invoke tools. This runtime execution model shifts the attack surface from build-time artifacts to inference-time dependencies, exposing agents to manipulation through untrusted data and probabilistic capability resolution. While prior work has focused on model-level vulnerabilities, security risks emerging from cyclic and interdependent runtime behavior remain fragmented. We systematize these risks within a unified runtime framework, categorizing threats into data supply chain attacks (transient context injection and persistent memory poisoning) and tool supply chain attacks (discovery, implementation, and invocation). We further identify the Viral Agent Loop, in which agents act as vectors for self-propagating generative worms without exploiting code-level flaws. Finally, we advocate a Zero-Trust Runtime Architecture that treats context as untrusted control flow and constrains tool execution through cryptographic provenance rather than semantic inference.

The proliferation of agentic AI coding assistants, including Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and emerging skill-based architectures, has fundamentally transformed software development workflows. These systems leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external tools, file systems, and shell access through protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). However, this expanded capability surface introduces critical security vulnerabilities. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of prompt injection attacks targeting agentic coding assistants. We propose a novel three-dimensional taxonomy categorizing attacks across delivery vectors, attack modalities, and propagation behaviors. Our meta-analysis synthesizes findings from 78 recent studies (2021--2026), consolidating evidence that attack success rates against state-of-the-art defenses exceed 85\% when adaptive attack strategies are employed. We systematically catalog 42 distinct attack techniques spanning input manipulation, tool poisoning, protocol exploitation, multimodal injection, and cross-origin context poisoning. Through critical analysis of 18 defense mechanisms reported in prior work, we identify that most achieve less than 50\% mitigation against sophisticated adaptive attacks. We contribute: (1) a unified taxonomy bridging disparate attack classifications, (2) the first systematic analysis of skill-based architecture vulnerabilities with concrete exploit chains, and (3) a defense-in-depth framework grounded in the limitations we identify. Our findings indicate that the security community must treat prompt injection as a first-class vulnerability class requiring architectural-level mitigations rather than ad-hoc filtering approaches.

Recently, a novel method known as Page Spray emerges, focusing on page-level exploitation for kernel vulnerabilities. Despite the advantages it offers in terms of exploitability, stability, and compatibility, comprehensive research on Page Spray remains scarce. Questions regarding its root causes, exploitation model, comparative benefits over other exploitation techniques, and possible mitigation strategies have largely remained unanswered. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation into Page Spray, providing an in-depth understanding of this exploitation technique. We introduce a comprehensive exploit model termed the \sys model, elucidating its fundamental principles. Additionally, we conduct a thorough analysis of the root causes underlying Page Spray occurrences within the Linux Kernel. We design an analyzer based on the Page Spray analysis model to identify Page Spray callsites. Subsequently, we evaluate the stability, exploitability, and compatibility of Page Spray through meticulously designed experiments. Finally, we propose mitigation principles for addressing Page Spray and introduce our own lightweight mitigation approach. This research aims to assist security researchers and developers in gaining insights into Page Spray, ultimately enhancing our collective understanding of this emerging exploitation technique and making improvements to the community.

Large Language Model (LLM) serving systems remain fundamentally fragile, where frequent hardware faults in hyperscale clusters trigger disproportionate service outages in the software stack. Current recovery mechanisms are prohibitively slow, often requiring up to 10 minutes to reinitialize resources and reload massive model weights. We introduce KevlarFlow, a fault tolerant serving architecture designed to bridge the gap between hardware unreliability and service availability. KevlarFlow leverages 1) decoupled model parallelism initialization, 2) dynamic traffic rerouting, and 3) background KV cache replication to maintain high throughput during partial failures. Our evaluation demonstrates that KevlarFlow reduces mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) by 20x and, under failure conditions, improves average latency by 3.1x, 99th percentile (p99) latency by 2.8x, average time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 378.9x, and p99 TTFT by 574.6x with negligible runtime overhead in comparison to state-of-the-art LLM serving systems.

Automatically generating source code from natural language using large language models (LLMs) is becoming common, yet security vulnerabilities persist despite advances in fine tuning and prompting. In this work, we systematically evaluate whether multi LLM ensembles and collaborative strategies can meaningfully improve secure code generation. We present MULTI-LLMSECCODEEVAL, a framework for assessing and enhancing security across the vulnerability management lifecycle by combining multiple LLMs with static analysis and structured collaboration. Using SecLLMEval and SecLLMHolmes, we benchmark ten pipelines spanning single model, ensemble, collaborative, and hybrid designs. Our results show that ensemble pipelines augmented with static analysis improve secure code generation over single LLM baselines by up to 47.3% on SecLLMEval and 19.3% on SecLLMHolmes, while purely LLM based collaborative pipelines yield smaller gains of 8.9% to 22.3%. Hybrid pipelines that integrate ensembling, detection, and patching achieve the strongest security performance, outperforming the best ensemble baseline by 1.78% to 4.72% and collaborative baselines by 19.81% to 26.78%. Ablation studies reveal that model scale alone does not ensure security. Smaller, structured multi model ensembles consistently outperform large monolithic LLMs. Overall, our findings demonstrate that secure code does not emerge from scale, but from carefully orchestrated multi model system design.

Prompt injection attacks pose a significant security threat to LLM-integrated applications. Model-level defenses have shown strong effectiveness, but are currently deployed into commercial-grade models in a closed-source manner. We believe open-source models are needed by the AI security community, where co-development of attacks and defenses through open research drives scientific progress in mitigation against prompt injection attacks. To this end, we develop Meta SecAlign, the first open-source and open-weight LLM with built-in model-level defense that achieves commercial-grade model performance. We provide complete details of our training recipe, which utilizes an improved version of the SOTA SecAlign defense. Evaluations on 9 utility benchmarks and 7 security benchmarks show that Meta SecAlign, despite being trained on a generic instruction-tuning dataset, confers security in unseen downstream tasks, including tool-calling and agentic web navigation, in addition general instruction-following. Our best model -- Meta-SecAlign-70B -- achieves state-of-the-art robustness against prompt injection attacks and comparable utility to closed-source commercial LLM with model-level defense.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers enable AI applications to connect to external systems in a plug-and-play manner, but their rapid proliferation also introduces severe security risks. Unlike mature software ecosystems with rigorous vetting, MCP servers still lack standardized review mechanisms, giving adversaries opportunities to distribute malicious implementations. Despite this pressing risk, the security implications of MCP servers remain underexplored. To address this gap, we present the first systematic study that treats MCP servers as active threat actors and decomposes them into core components to examine how adversarial developers can implant malicious intent. Specifically, we investigate three research questions: (i) what types of attacks malicious MCP servers can launch, (ii) how vulnerable MCP hosts and Large Language Models (LLMs) are to these attacks, and (iii) how feasible it is to carry out MCP server attacks in practice. Our study proposes a component-based taxonomy comprising twelve attack categories. For each category, we develop Proof-of-Concept (PoC) servers and demonstrate their effectiveness across diverse real-world host-LLM settings. We further show that attackers can generate large numbers of malicious servers at virtually no cost. We then test state-of-the-art scanners on the generated servers and found that existing detection approaches are insufficient. These findings highlight that malicious MCP servers are easy to implement, difficult to detect with current tools, and capable of causing concrete damage to AI agent systems. Addressing this threat requires coordinated efforts among protocol designers, host developers, LLM providers, and end users to build a more secure and resilient MCP ecosystem.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to automate real-world vulnerability detection due to two key limitations: the heterogeneity of vulnerability patterns undermines the effectiveness of a single unified model, and manual prompt engineering for massive weakness categories is unscalable. To address these challenges, we propose MulVul, a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework designed for precise and broad-coverage vulnerability detection. MulVul adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy: a Router agent first predicts the top-k coarse categories and then forwards the input to specialized Detector agents, which identify the exact vulnerability types. Both agents are equipped with retrieval tools to actively source evidence from vulnerability knowledge bases to mitigate hallucinations. Crucially, to automate the generation of specialized prompts, we design Cross-Model Prompt Evolution, a prompt optimization mechanism where a generator LLM iteratively refines candidate prompts while a distinct executor LLM validates their effectiveness. This decoupling mitigates the self-correction bias inherent in single-model optimization. Evaluated on 130 CWE types, MulVul achieves 34.79\% Macro-F1, outperforming the best baseline by 41.5\%. Ablation studies validate cross-model prompt evolution, which boosts performance by 51.6\% over manual prompts by effectively handling diverse vulnerability patterns.

Concurrent LLM agents sharing mutable natural-language state produce Structural Race Conditions (SRCs): write-write and cross-shard stale-read conflicts that silently corrupt agent output. Existing multi-agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen) provide no write-ownership semantics over shared state. We present S-Bus, an HTTP middleware whose central mechanism is a server-side DeliveryLog: a per-agent log of HTTP GET operations that automatically reconstructs each agent's read set at commit time without agent SDK changes under HTTP/1.1. The consistency property the DeliveryLog provides -- Observable-Read Isolation (ORI), a partial causal consistency over the HTTP-observable projection of the read set -- prevents structural race conditions when agents collaborate via shared shards. Three contributions: (C1) The DeliveryLog mechanism for automatic HTTP-traffic-based read-set reconstruction, with three-tier mechanised evidence: ReadSetSoundness and ORICommitSafety machine-checked in TLAPS (modulo one retained typing axiom); exhaustive TLC at N=3 (20,763,484 distinct states, zero violations); Dafny discharges 9 inductive soundness lemmas. (C2) Empirical structural-conflict prevention parity against PostgreSQL 17 SERIALIZABLE and Redis 7 WATCH/MULTI on shared-shard contention sweeps with 427,308 active HTTP-409 conflicts: zero Type-I corruptions across all three backends. (C3) ORI's operating envelope is topology-conditional: semantically neutral in dedicated-shard workloads; harmful in single-shard collaborative writing because preservation propagates concurrent contradictions. Source code: https://github.com/sajjadanwar0/sbus

AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss. The only known robust defense is architectural isolation that strictly separates trusted task planning from untrusted environment observations. However, applying this design to Computer Use Agents (CUAs) -- systems that automate tasks by viewing screens and executing actions -- presents a fundamental challenge: current agents require continuous observation of UI state to determine each action, conflicting with the isolation required for security. We resolve this tension by demonstrating that UI workflows, while dynamic, are structurally predictable. We introduce Single-Shot Planning for CUAs, where a trusted planner generates a complete execution graph with conditional branches before any observation of potentially malicious content, providing provable control flow integrity guarantees against arbitrary instruction injections. Although this architectural isolation successfully prevents instruction injections, we show that additional measures are needed to prevent Branch Steering attacks, which manipulate UI elements to trigger unintended valid paths within the plan. We evaluate our design on OSWorld, and retain up to 57% of the performance of frontier models while improving performance for smaller open-source models by up to 19%, demonstrating that rigorous security and utility can coexist in CUAs.

As LLM-powered agents are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud environments, personalized memory has become a key enabler of long-term adaptation and user-centric interaction. However, cloud-assisted memory management exposes sensitive user information, while existing privacy protection methods typically rely on aggressive masking that removes task-relevant semantics and consequently degrades memory utility and personalization quality. To address this challenge, We propose MemPrivacy, which identifies privacy-sensitive spans on edge devices, replaces them with semantically structured type-aware placeholders for cloud-side memory processing, and restores the original values locally when needed. By decoupling privacy protection from semantic destruction, MemPrivacy minimizes sensitive data exposure while retaining the information required for effective memory formation and retrieval. We also construct MemPrivacy-Bench for systematic evaluation, a dataset covering 200 users and over 52k privacy instances, and introduce a four-level privacy taxonomy for configurable protection policies. Experiments show that MemPrivacy achieves strong performance in privacy information extraction, substantially surpassing strong general-purpose models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.1-Pro, while also reducing inference latency. Across multiple widely used memory systems, MemPrivacy limits utility loss to within 1.6%, outperforming baseline masking strategies. Overall, MemPrivacy offers an effective balance between privacy protection and personalized memory utility for edge-cloud agents, enabling secure, practical, and user-transparent deployment.

To reduce development overhead and enable seamless integration between potential components comprising any given generative AI application, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) (Anthropic, 2024) has recently been released and subsequently widely adopted. The MCP is an open protocol that standardizes API calls to large language models (LLMs), data sources, and agentic tools. By connecting multiple MCP servers, each defined with a set of tools, resources, and prompts, users are able to define automated workflows fully driven by LLMs. However, we show that the current MCP design carries a wide range of security risks for end users. In particular, we demonstrate that industry-leading LLMs may be coerced into using MCP tools to compromise an AI developer's system through various attacks, such as malicious code execution, remote access control, and credential theft. To proactively mitigate these and related attacks, we introduce a safety auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, the first agentic tool to assess the security of an arbitrary MCP server. MCPScanner uses several agents to (a) automatically determine adversarial samples given an MCP server's tools and resources; (b) search for related vulnerabilities and remediations based on those samples; and (c) generate a security report detailing all findings. Our work highlights serious security issues with general-purpose agentic workflows while also providing a proactive tool to audit MCP server safety and address detected vulnerabilities before deployment. The described MCP server auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, is freely available at: https://github.com/johnhalloran321/mcpSafetyScanner

AI agent frameworks connecting large language model (LLM) reasoning to host execution surfaces--shell, filesystem, containers, and messaging--introduce security challenges structurally distinct from conventional software. We present a systematic taxonomy of 190 advisories filed against OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime, organized by architectural layer and trust-violation type. Vulnerabilities cluster along two orthogonal axes: (1) the system axis, reflecting the architectural layer (exec policy, gateway, channel, sandbox, browser, plugin, agent/prompt); and (2) the attack axis, reflecting adversarial techniques (identity spoofing, policy bypass, cross-layer composition, prompt injection, supply-chain escalation). Patch-differential evidence yields three principal findings. First, three Moderate- or High-severity advisories in the Gateway and Node-Host subsystems compose into a complete unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) path--spanning delivery, exploitation, and command-and-control--from an LLM tool call to the host process. Second, the exec allowlist, the primary command-filtering mechanism, relies on a closed-world assumption that command identity is recoverable via lexical parsing. This is invalidated by shell line continuation, busybox multiplexing, and GNU option abbreviation. Third, a malicious skill distributed via the plugin channel executed a two-stage dropper within the LLM context, bypassing the exec pipeline and demonstrating that the skill distribution surface lacks runtime policy enforcement. The dominant structural weakness is per-layer trust enforcement rather than unified policy boundaries, making cross-layer attacks resilient to local remediation.

The rapid advancement of ML models in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and security has intensified the need for robust data security, model integrity, and reliable outputs. Large multimodal foundational models, while crucial for complex tasks, present challenges in scalability, reliability, and potential misuse. Decentralized systems offer a solution by distributing workload and mitigating central points of failure, but they introduce risks of unauthorized access to sensitive data across nodes. We address these challenges with a comprehensive framework designed for responsible AI development. Our approach incorporates: 1) Zero-knowledge proofs for secure model verification, enhancing trust without compromising privacy. 2) Consensus-based verification checks to ensure consistent outputs across nodes, mitigating hallucinations and maintaining model integrity. 3) Split Learning techniques that segment models across different nodes, preserving data privacy by preventing full data access at any point. 4) Hardware-based security through trusted execution environments (TEEs) to protect data and computations. This framework aims to enhance security and privacy and improve the reliability and fairness of multimodal AI systems. Promoting efficient resource utilization contributes to more sustainable AI development. Our state-of-the-art proofs and principles demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in responsibly democratizing artificial intelligence, offering a promising approach for building secure and private foundational models.

Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate native code interpreters, they enable powerful real-time execution capabilities, substantially expanding their utility. However, such integrations introduce potential system-level cybersecurity threats, fundamentally different from prompt-based vulnerabilities. To systematically evaluate these interpreter-specific risks, we propose CIRCLE (Code-Interpreter Resilience Check for LLM Exploits), a simple benchmark comprising 1,260 prompts targeting CPU, memory, and disk resource exhaustion. Each risk category includes explicitly malicious ("direct") and plausibly benign ("indirect") prompt variants. Our automated evaluation framework assesses not only whether LLMs refuse or generates risky code, but also executes the generated code within the interpreter environment to evaluate code correctness, simplifications made by the LLM to make the code safe, or execution timeouts. Evaluating 7 commercially available models from OpenAI and Google, we uncover significant and inconsistent vulnerabilities. For instance, evaluations show substantial disparities even within providers - OpenAI's o4-mini correctly refuses risky requests at 7.1%, notably higher rates compared to GPT-4.1 at 0.5%. Results particularly underscore that indirect, socially-engineered prompts substantially weaken model defenses. This highlights an urgent need for interpreter-specific cybersecurity benchmarks, dedicated mitigation tools (e.g., guardrails), and clear industry standards to guide safe and responsible deployment of LLM interpreter integrations. The benchmark dataset and evaluation code are publicly released to foster further research.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a significant advancement in AI-tool integration, enabling seamless communication between AI agents and external services. However, this connectivity introduces novel attack vectors that remain largely unexplored. This paper demonstrates how unsophisticated threat actors, requiring only basic programming skills and free web tools, can exploit MCP's trust model to exfiltrate sensitive financial data. We present a proof-of-concept attack where a malicious weather MCP server, disguised as benign functionality, discovers and exploits legitimate banking tools to steal user account balances. The attack chain requires no advanced technical knowledge, server infrastructure, or monetary investment. The findings reveal a critical security gap in the emerging MCP ecosystem: while individual servers may appear trustworthy, their combination creates unexpected cross-server attack surfaces. Unlike traditional cybersecurity threats that assume sophisticated adversaries, our research shows that the barrier to entry for MCP-based attacks is alarmingly low. A threat actor with undergraduate-level Python knowledge can craft convincing social engineering attacks that exploit the implicit trust relationships MCP establishes between AI agents and tool providers. This work contributes to the nascent field of MCP security by demonstrating that current MCP implementations allow trivial cross-server attacks and proposing both immediate mitigations and protocol improvements to secure this emerging ecosystem.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into automated, multi-stage pipelines, risk patterns that arise from unvalidated trust between processing stages become a practical concern. This paper presents a mechanism-centered taxonomy of 41 recurring risk patterns in commercial LLMs. The analysis shows that inputs are often interpreted non-neutrally and can trigger implementation-shaped responses or unintended state changes even without explicit commands. We argue that these behaviors constitute architectural failure modes and that string-level filtering alone is insufficient. To mitigate such cross-stage vulnerabilities, we recommend zero-trust architectural principles, including provenance enforcement, context sealing, and plan revalidation, and we introduce "Countermind" as a conceptual blueprint for implementing these defenses.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly pervasive and essential components in enabling new applications and services. However, their widespread use also exposes them to exploitable vulnerabilities and flaws that can lead to significant losses. In this context, ensuring robust cybersecurity measures is essential to protect IoT devices from malicious attacks. However, the current solutions that provide flexible policy specifications and higher security levels for IoT devices are scarce. To address this gap, we introduce T800, a low-resource packet filter that utilizes machine learning (ML) algorithms to classify packets in IoT devices. We present a detailed performance benchmarking framework and demonstrate T800's effectiveness on the ESP32 system-on-chip microcontroller and ESP-IDF framework. Our evaluation shows that T800 is an efficient solution that increases device computational capacity by excluding unsolicited malicious traffic from the processing pipeline. Additionally, T800 is adaptable to different systems and provides a well-documented performance evaluation strategy for security ML-based mechanisms on ESP32-based IoT systems. Our research contributes to improving the cybersecurity of resource-constrained IoT devices and provides a scalable, efficient solution that can be used to enhance the security of IoT systems.

Large language models (LLMs) extended as systems, such as ChatGPT, have begun supporting third-party applications. These LLM apps leverage the de facto natural language-based automated execution paradigm of LLMs: that is, apps and their interactions are defined in natural language, provided access to user data, and allowed to freely interact with each other and the system. These LLM app ecosystems resemble the settings of earlier computing platforms, where there was insufficient isolation between apps and the system. Because third-party apps may not be trustworthy, and exacerbated by the imprecision of natural language interfaces, the current designs pose security and privacy risks for users. In this paper, we evaluate whether these issues can be addressed through execution isolation and what that isolation might look like in the context of LLM-based systems, where there are arbitrary natural language-based interactions between system components, between LLM and apps, and between apps. To that end, we propose IsolateGPT, a design architecture that demonstrates the feasibility of execution isolation and provides a blueprint for implementing isolation, in LLM-based systems. We evaluate IsolateGPT against a number of attacks and demonstrate that it protects against many security, privacy, and safety issues that exist in non-isolated LLM-based systems, without any loss of functionality. The performance overhead incurred by IsolateGPT to improve security is under 30% for three-quarters of tested queries.

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has led to the adoption of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that dynamically leverage specialized subnetworks for improved efficiency and performance. Despite their benefits, MoE models face significant challenges during inference, including inefficient memory management and suboptimal batching, due to misaligned design choices between the model architecture and the system policies. Furthermore, the conventional approach of training MoEs from scratch is increasingly prohibitive in terms of cost. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Read-ME that transforms pre-trained dense LLMs into smaller MoE models (in contrast to "upcycling" generalist MoEs), avoiding the high costs of ground-up training. Our approach employs activation sparsity to extract experts. To compose experts, we examine the widely-adopted layer-wise router design and show its redundancy, and thus we introduce the pre-gating router decoupled from the MoE backbone that facilitates system-friendly pre-computing and lookahead scheduling, enhancing expert-aware batching and caching. Our codesign therefore addresses critical gaps on both the algorithmic and system fronts, establishing a scalable and efficient alternative for LLM inference in resource-constrained settings. Read-ME outperforms other popular open-source dense models of similar scales, achieving improvements of up to 10.1% on MMLU, and improving mean end-to-end latency up to 6.1%. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/READ-ME.

Current model training approaches incorporate user information directly into shared weights, making individual data removal computationally infeasible without retraining. This paper presents a three-layer architecture that decouples personal data from shared weights by combining a static base model, composable domain-expert LoRA adapters that shape behavior without imparting user data, and per-user proxy artefacts whose deletion constitutes deterministic unlearning. Evaluation on Phi-3.5-mini and Llama-3.1-8B confirms per-user differentiation in which personal data influences outputs while remaining isolated, verified by a return to baseline after proxy removal (KL divergence of approximately 0.21 nats, 82-89% verification pass rate) and near-zero cross-user contamination. Because user-specific information never enters shared weights, the architecture mitigates model inversion, membership inference, and training-data extraction against shared model components by construction. The approach converts machine unlearning from an intractable weight-editing problem into a deterministic deletion operation that preserves personalization alongside privacy-enhancing guarantees and is compatible with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) for privacy-preserving shared model improvement.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, safeguarding them against unsafe, malicious, or privacy-violating content is critically important. We present OpenGuardrails, the first open-source project to provide both a context-aware safety and manipulation detection model and a deployable platform for comprehensive AI guardrails. OpenGuardrails protects against content-safety risks, model-manipulation attacks (e.g., prompt injection, jailbreaking, code-interpreter abuse, and the generation/execution of malicious code), and data leakage. Content-safety and model-manipulation detection are implemented by a unified large model, while data-leakage identification and redaction are performed by a separate lightweight NER pipeline (e.g., Presidio-style models or regex-based detectors). The system can be deployed as a security gateway or an API-based service, with enterprise-grade, fully private deployment options. OpenGuardrails achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on safety benchmarks, excelling in both prompt and response classification across English, Chinese, and multilingual tasks. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for public use.

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly used in a variety of domains to automate tasks, interact with users, and make decisions based on data inputs. Ensuring that AI agents perform only authorized actions and handle inputs appropriately is essential for maintaining system integrity and preventing misuse. In this study, we introduce the AgentGuardian, a novel security framework that governs and protects AI agent operations by enforcing context-aware access-control policies. During a controlled staging phase, the framework monitors execution traces to learn legitimate agent behaviors and input patterns. From this phase, it derives adaptive policies that regulate tool calls made by the agent, guided by both real-time input context and the control flow dependencies of multi-step agent actions. Evaluation across two real-world AI agent applications demonstrates that AgentGuardian effectively detects malicious or misleading inputs while preserving normal agent functionality. Moreover, its control-flow-based governance mechanism mitigates hallucination-driven errors and other orchestration-level malfunctions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of powerful agentic systems capable of automating complex workflows across various fields. However, these systems are highly vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external data can hijack agent behavior. In this work, we present ReasAlign, a model-level solution to improve safety alignment against indirect prompt injection attacks. The core idea of ReasAlign is to incorporate structured reasoning steps to analyze user queries, detect conflicting instructions, and preserve the continuity of the user's intended tasks to defend against indirect injection attacks. To further ensure reasoning logic and accuracy, we introduce a test-time scaling mechanism with a preference-optimized judge model that scores reasoning steps and selects the best trajectory. Comprehensive evaluations across various benchmarks show that ReasAlign maintains utility comparable to an undefended model while consistently outperforming Meta SecAlign, the strongest prior guardrail. On the representative open-ended CyberSecEval2 benchmark, which includes multiple prompt-injected tasks, ReasAlign achieves 94.6% utility and only 3.6% ASR, far surpassing the state-of-the-art defensive model of Meta SecAlign (56.4% utility and 74.4% ASR). These results demonstrate that ReasAlign achieves the best trade-off between security and utility, establishing a robust and practical defense against prompt injection attacks in real-world agentic systems. Our code and experimental results could be found at https://github.com/leolee99/ReasAlign.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal, open standard for connecting AI agents with data sources and external tools. While MCP enhances the capabilities of LLM-based agents, it also introduces new security risks and expands their attack surfaces. In this paper, we present the first systematic taxonomy of MCP security, identifying 17 attack types across 4 primary attack surfaces. We introduce MCPSecBench, a comprehensive security benchmark and playground that integrates prompt datasets, MCP servers, MCP clients, attack scripts, and protection mechanisms to evaluate these attacks across three major MCP providers. Our benchmark is modular and extensible, allowing researchers to incorporate custom implementations of clients, servers, and transport protocols for systematic security assessment. Experimental results show that over 85% of the identified attacks successfully compromise at least one platform, with core vulnerabilities universally affecting Claude, OpenAI, and Cursor, while prompt-based and tool-centric attacks exhibit considerable variability across different hosts and models. In addition, current protection mechanisms have little effect against these attacks. Overall, MCPSecBench standardizes the evaluation of MCP security and enables rigorous testing across all MCP layers.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) can now autonomously complete complex tasks in real digital environments, but when misled, they can also be used to automate harmful actions programmatically. Existing safety evaluations largely target explicit threats such as misuse and prompt injection, but overlook a subtle yet critical setting where user instructions are entirely benign and harm arises from the task context or execution outcome. We introduce OS-BLIND, a benchmark that evaluates CUAs under unintended attack conditions, comprising 300 human-crafted tasks across 12 categories, 8 applications, and 2 threat clusters: environment-embedded threats and agent-initiated harms. Our evaluation on frontier models and agentic frameworks reveals that most CUAs exceed 90% attack success rate (ASR), and even the safety-aligned Claude 4.5 Sonnet reaches 73.0% ASR. More interestingly, this vulnerability becomes even more severe, with ASR rising from 73.0% to 92.7% when Claude 4.5 Sonnet is deployed in multi-agent systems. Our analysis further shows that existing safety defenses provide limited protection when user instructions are benign. Safety alignment primarily activates within the first few steps and rarely re-engages during subsequent execution. In multi-agent systems, decomposed subtasks obscure the harmful intent from the model, causing safety-aligned models to fail. We will release our OS-BLIND to encourage the broader research community to further investigate and address these safety challenges.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging standard designed to enable seamless interaction between Large Language Model (LLM) applications and external tools or resources. Within a short period, thousands of MCP services have already been developed and deployed. However, the client-server integration architecture inherent in MCP may expand the attack surface against LLM Agent systems, introducing new vulnerabilities that allow attackers to exploit by designing malicious MCP servers. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of attack vectors targeting the MCP ecosystem. Our analysis identifies four categories of attacks, i.e., Tool Poisoning Attacks, Puppet Attacks, Rug Pull Attacks, and Exploitation via Malicious External Resources. To evaluate the feasibility of these attacks, we conduct experiments following the typical steps of launching an attack through malicious MCP servers: upload-download-attack. Specifically, we first construct malicious MCP servers and successfully upload them to three widely used MCP aggregation platforms. The results indicate that current audit mechanisms are insufficient to identify and prevent the proposed attack methods. Next, through a user study and interview with 20 participants, we demonstrate that users struggle to identify malicious MCP servers and often unknowingly install them from aggregator platforms. Finally, we demonstrate that these attacks can trigger harmful behaviors within the user's local environment-such as accessing private files or controlling devices to transfer digital assets-by deploying a proof-of-concept (PoC) framework against five leading LLMs. Additionally, based on interview results, we discuss four key challenges faced by the current security ecosystem surrounding MCP servers. These findings underscore the urgent need for robust security mechanisms to defend against malicious MCP servers.

With the advent of specialized hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), large scale image localization, classification and retrieval have seen increased prevalence. Designing scalable software architecture that co-evolves with such specialized hardware is a challenge in the commercial setting. In this paper, we describe one such architecture (Cortexica) that leverages scalability of GPUs and sandboxing offered by docker containers. This allows for the flexibility of mixing different computer architectures as well as computational algorithms with the security of a trusted environment. We illustrate the utility of this framework in a commercial setting i.e., searching for multiple products in an image by combining image localisation and retrieval.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) replaces static, developer-controlled API integrations with more dynamic, user-driven agent systems, which also introduces new security risks. As MCP adoption grows across community servers and major platforms, organizations encounter threats that existing AI governance frameworks (such as NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001) do not yet cover in detail. We focus on three types of adversaries that take advantage of MCP s flexibility: content-injection attackers that embed malicious instructions into otherwise legitimate data; supply-chain attackers who distribute compromised servers; and agents who become unintentional adversaries by over-stepping their role. Based on early incidents and proof-of-concept attacks, we describe how MCP can increase the attack surface through data-driven exfiltration, tool poisoning, and cross-system privilege escalation. In response, we propose a set of practical controls, including per-user authentication with scoped authorization, provenance tracking across agent workflows, containerized sandboxing with input/output checks, inline policy enforcement with DLP and anomaly detection, and centralized governance using private registries or gateway layers. The aim is to help organizations ensure that unvetted code does not run outside a sandbox, tools are not used beyond their intended scope, data exfiltration attempts are detectable, and actions can be audited end-to-end. We close by outlining open research questions around verifiable registries, formal methods for these dynamic systems, and privacy-preserving agent operations.

Current LLM safety defenses fail under decomposition attacks, where a malicious goal is decomposed into benign subtasks that circumvent refusals. The challenge lies in the existing shallow safety alignment techniques: they only detect harm in the immediate prompt and do not reason about long-range intent, leaving them blind to malicious intent that emerges over a sequence of seemingly benign instructions. We therefore propose adding an external monitor that observes the conversation at a higher granularity. To facilitate our study of monitoring decomposition attacks, we curate the largest and most diverse dataset to date, including question-answering, text-to-image, and agentic tasks. We verify our datasets by testing them on frontier LLMs and show an 87% attack success rate on average on GPT-4o. This confirms that decomposition attack is broadly effective. Additionally, we find that random tasks can be injected into the decomposed subtasks to further obfuscate malicious intents. To defend in real time, we propose a lightweight sequential monitoring framework that cumulatively evaluates each subtask. We show that a carefully prompt engineered lightweight monitor achieves a 93% defense success rate, beating reasoning models like o3 mini as a monitor. Moreover, it remains robust against random task injection and cuts cost by 90% and latency by 50%. Our findings suggest that lightweight sequential monitors are highly effective in mitigating decomposition attacks and are viable in deployment.

Data-intensive applications, ranging from large-scale retrieval systems to advanced data pipelines, are increasingly bottlenecked by the processing of highly redundant text corpora. We present Merlin, a local-first, agnostic, high-throughput deduplication and context optimization engine designed to mitigate these inefficiencies. Utilizing a highly optimized, SIMD-friendly open-addressing flat hash set combined with xxHash3-64, Merlin performs rapid, byte-exact deduplication of text passages and data chunks. While broadly applicable to any text-processing workflow, its impact is particularly pronounced in Large Language Model (LLM) ecosystems, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Our empirical evaluations demonstrate an input reduction ranging from 13.9% in low-redundancy datasets to over 71% in high-redundancy pipelines, maintaining absolute data fidelity. Furthermore, we detail the system's integration architecture via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling secure, zero-network-interception deployment across major IDEs and autonomous agents. This paper outlines the core algorithmic design, performance benchmarks, and the architectural principles required to process data at sustained speeds of up to 8.7 GB/s.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables large language models to invoke external tools through natural-language descriptions, forming the foundation of many AI agent applications. However, MCP does not enforce consistency between documented tool behavior and actual code execution, even though MCP Servers often run with broad system privileges. This gap introduces a largely unexplored security risk. We study how mismatches between externally presented tool descriptions and underlying implementations systematically shape the mental models and decision-making behavior of intelligent agents. Specifically, we present the first large-scale study of description-code inconsistency in the MCP ecosystem. We design an automated static analysis framework and apply it to 10,240 real-world MCP Servers across 36 categories. Our results show that while most servers are highly consistent, approximately 13% exhibit substantial mismatches that can enable undocumented privileged operations, hidden state mutations, or unauthorized financial actions. We further observe systematic differences across application categories, popularity levels, and MCP marketplaces. Our findings demonstrate that description-code inconsistency is a concrete and prevalent attack surface in MCP-based AI agents, and motivate the need for systematic auditing and stronger transparency guarantees in future agent ecosystems.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) offer powerful cross-modality capabilities but introduce new safety risks not observed in single-task models. Despite their emergence, existing safety benchmarks remain fragmented across tasks and modalities, limiting the comprehensive evaluation of complex system-level vulnerabilities. To address this gap, we introduce UniSAFE, the first comprehensive benchmark for system-level safety evaluation of UMMs across 7 I/O modality combinations, spanning conventional tasks and novel multimodal-context image generation settings. UniSAFE is built with a shared-target design that projects common risk scenarios across task-specific I/O configurations, enabling controlled cross-task comparisons of safety failures. Comprising 6,802 curated instances, we use UniSAFE to evaluate 15 state-of-the-art UMMs, both proprietary and open-source. Our results reveal critical vulnerabilities across current UMMs, including elevated safety violations in multi-image composition and multi-turn settings, with image-output tasks consistently more vulnerable than text-output tasks. These findings highlight the need for stronger system-level safety alignment for UMMs. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/segyulee/UniSAFE

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how large language model (LLM) agents discover, describe, and call external tools. While MCP unlocks broad interoperability, it also enlarges the attack surface by making tools first-class, composable objects with natural-language metadata, and standardized I/O. We present MSB (MCP Security Benchmark), the first end-to-end evaluation suite that systematically measures how well LLM agents resist MCP-specific attacks throughout the full tool-use pipeline: task planning, tool invocation, and response handling. MSB contributes: (1) a taxonomy of 12 attacks including name-collision, preference manipulation, prompt injections embedded in tool descriptions, out-of-scope parameter requests, user-impersonating responses, false-error escalation, tool-transfer, retrieval injection, and mixed attacks; (2) an evaluation harness that executes attacks by running real tools (both benign and malicious) via MCP rather than simulation; and (3) a robustness metric that quantifies the trade-off between security and performance: Net Resilient Performance (NRP). We evaluate nine popular LLM agents across 10 domains and 405 tools, producing 2,000 attack instances. Results reveal the effectiveness of attacks against each stage of MCP. Models with stronger performance are more vulnerable to attacks due to their outstanding tool calling and instruction following capabilities. MSB provides a practical baseline for researchers and practitioners to study, compare, and harden MCP agents. Code: https://github.com/dongsenzhang/MSB

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly emerged as a universal standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools and data sources. While MCP simplifies integration between AI applications and various services, it introduces significant security vulnerabilities, particularly on the client side. In this work we conduct threat modelings of MCP implementations using STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege) and DREAD (Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, Discoverability) frameworks across five key components: (1) MCP Host and Client, (2) LLM, (3) MCP Server, (4) External Data Stores, and (5) Authorization Server. This comprehensive analysis reveals tool poisoning-where malicious instructions are embedded in tool metadata-as the most prevalent and impactful client-side vulnerability. We therefore focus our empirical evaluation on this critical attack vector, providing a systematic comparison of how seven major MCP clients validate and defend against tool poisoning attacks. Our analysis reveals significant security issues with most tested clients due to insufficient static validation and parameter visibility. We propose a multi-layered defense strategy encompassing static metadata analysis, model decision path tracking, behavioral anomaly detection, and user transparency mechanisms. This research addresses a critical gap in MCP security, which has primarily focused on server-side vulnerabilities, and provides actionable recommendations and mitigation strategies for securing AI agent ecosystems.

The rapid integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into critical applications is increasingly hindered by persistent safety vulnerabilities. However, existing red-teaming benchmarks are often fragmented, limited to single-turn text interactions, and lack the scalability required for systematic evaluation. To address this, we introduce OpenRT, a unified, modular, and high-throughput red-teaming framework designed for comprehensive MLLM safety evaluation. At its core, OpenRT architects a paradigm shift in automated red-teaming by introducing an adversarial kernel that enables modular separation across five critical dimensions: model integration, dataset management, attack strategies, judging methods, and evaluation metrics. By standardizing attack interfaces, it decouples adversarial logic from a high-throughput asynchronous runtime, enabling systematic scaling across diverse models. Our framework integrates 37 diverse attack methodologies, spanning white-box gradients, multi-modal perturbations, and sophisticated multi-agent evolutionary strategies. Through an extensive empirical study on 20 advanced models (including GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro), we expose critical safety gaps: even frontier models fail to generalize across attack paradigms, with leading models exhibiting average Attack Success Rates as high as 49.14%. Notably, our findings reveal that reasoning models do not inherently possess superior robustness against complex, multi-turn jailbreaks. By open-sourcing OpenRT, we provide a sustainable, extensible, and continuously maintained infrastructure that accelerates the development and standardization of AI safety.

As more devices connect to the internet, it becomes crucial to address their limitations and basic security needs. While much research focuses on utilizing ML and DL to tackle security challenges, there is often a tendency to overlook the practicality and feasibility of implementing these methods in real-time settings. This oversight stems from the constrained processing power and memory of certain devices (IoT devices), as well as concerns about the generalizability of these approaches. Focusing on the detection of DNS-tunneling attacks in a router as a case study, we present an end-to-end process designed to effectively address these challenges. The process spans from developing a lightweight DNS-tunneling detection model to integrating it into a resource-constrained device for real-time detection. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that utilizing stateless features for training the ML model, along with features chosen to be independent of the network configuration, leads to highly accurate results. The deployment of this carefully crafted model, optimized for embedded devices across diverse environments, resulted in high DNS-tunneling attack detection with minimal latency. With this work, we aim to encourage solutions that strike a balance between theoretical advancements and the practical applicability of ML approaches in the ever-evolving landscape of device security.

Computer-use agent (CUA) frameworks, powered by large language models (LLMs) or multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), are rapidly maturing as assistants that can perceive context, reason, and act directly within software environments. Among their most critical applications is operating system (OS) control. As CUAs in the OS domain become increasingly embedded in daily operations, it is imperative to examine their real-world security implications, specifically whether CUAs can be misused to perform realistic, security-relevant attacks. Existing works exhibit four major limitations: Missing attacker-knowledge model on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), Incomplete coverage for end-to-end kill chains, unrealistic environment without multi-host and encrypted user credentials, and unreliable judgment dependent on LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these gaps, we propose AdvCUA, the first benchmark aligned with real-world TTPs in MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Matrix, which comprises 140 tasks, including 40 direct malicious tasks, 74 TTP-based malicious tasks, and 26 end-to-end kill chains, systematically evaluates CUAs under a realistic enterprise OS security threat in a multi-host environment sandbox by hard-coded evaluation. We evaluate the existing five mainstream CUAs, including ReAct, AutoGPT, Gemini CLI, Cursor CLI, and Cursor IDE based on 8 foundation LLMs. The results demonstrate that current frontier CUAs do not adequately cover OS security-centric threats. These capabilities of CUAs reduce dependence on custom malware and deep domain expertise, enabling even inexperienced attackers to mount complex enterprise intrusions, which raises social concern about the responsibility and security of CUAs.

Compartmentalization effectively prevents initial corruption from turning into a successful attack. This paper presents O2C, a pioneering system designed to enforce OS kernel compartmentalization on the fly. It not only provides immediate remediation for sudden threats but also maintains consistent system availability through the enforcement process. O2C is empowered by the newest advancements of the eBPF ecosystem which allows to instrument eBPF programs that perform enforcement actions into the kernel at runtime. O2C takes the lead in embedding a machine learning model into eBPF programs, addressing unique challenges in on-the-fly compartmentalization. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that O2C effectively confines damage within the compartment. Further, we validate that decision tree is optimally suited for O2C owing to its advantages in processing tabular data, its explainable nature, and its compliance with the eBPF ecosystem. Last but not least, O2C is lightweight, showing negligible overhead and excellent sacalability system-wide.

Our work tackles the challenge of securing user inputs in cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) serving while ensuring output invariance, model confidentiality, and compute efficiency. We introduce secure multi-party decoding (SMD), which leverages confidential computing to confine user prompts to a trusted execution environment (TEE), namely a confidential virtual machine (CVM), while allowing service providers to generate tokens efficiently. We also introduce a novel cryptographic method, prompt obfuscation (PO), to ensure robustness against reconstruction attacks on SMD. We demonstrate that our approach preserves both prompt confidentiality and LLM serving efficiency. Our solution can enable privacy-preserving cloud LLM serving that handles sensitive prompts, such as clinical records, financial data, and personal information.

The rapid development of the AI agent communication protocols, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), Agora, and Agent Network Protocol (ANP), is reshaping how AI agents communicate with tools, services, and each other. While these protocols support scalable multi-agent interaction and cross-organizational interoperability, their security principles remain understudied, and standardized threat modeling is limited; no protocol-centric risk assessment framework has been established yet. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of four emerging AI agent communication protocols. First, we develop a structured threat modeling analysis that examines protocol architectures, trust assumptions, interaction patterns, and lifecycle behaviors to identify protocol-specific and cross-protocol risk surfaces. Second, we introduce a qualitative risk assessment framework that identifies twelve protocol-level risks and evaluates security posture across the creation, operation, and update phases through systematic assessment of likelihood, impact, and overall protocol risk, with implications for secure deployment and future standardization. Third, we provide a measurement-driven case study on MCP that formalizes the risk of missing mandatory validation/attestation for executable components as a falsifiable security claim by quantifying wrong-provider tool execution under multi-server composition across representative resolver policies. Collectively, our results highlight key design-induced risk surfaces and provide actionable guidance for secure deployment and future standardization of agent communication ecosystems.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized interface designed to enable seamless interaction between AI models and external tools and resources, breaking down data silos and facilitating interoperability across diverse systems. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of MCP, focusing on its core components, workflow, and the lifecycle of MCP servers, which consists of three key phases: creation, operation, and update. We analyze the security and privacy risks associated with each phase and propose strategies to mitigate potential threats. The paper also examines the current MCP landscape, including its adoption by industry leaders and various use cases, as well as the tools and platforms supporting its integration. We explore future directions for MCP, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that will influence its adoption and evolution within the broader AI ecosystem. Finally, we offer recommendations for MCP stakeholders to ensure its secure and sustainable development as the AI landscape continues to evolve.

Recent studies have revealed that self-sustaining cascading failures in distributed systems frequently lead to widespread outages, which are challenging to contain and recover from. Existing failure detection techniques struggle to expose such failures prior to deployment, as they typically require a complex combination of specific conditions to be triggered. This challenge stems from the inherent nature of cascading failures, as they typically involve a sequence of fault propagations, each activated by distinct conditions. This paper presents CSnake, a fault injection framework to expose self-sustaining cascading failures in distributed systems. CSnake uses the novel idea of causal stitching, which causally links multiple single-fault injections in different tests to simulate complex fault propagation chains. To identify these chains, CSnake designs a counterfactual causality analysis of fault propagations - fault causality analysis (FCA): FCA compares the execution trace of a fault injection run with its corresponding profile run (i.e., same test w/o the injection) and identifies any additional faults triggered, which are considered to have a causal relationship with the injected fault. To address the large search space of fault and workload combinations, CSnake employs a three-phase allocation protocol of test budget that prioritizes faults with unique and diverse causal consequences, increasing the likelihood of uncovering conditional fault propagations. Furthermore, to avoid incorrectly connecting fault propagations from workloads with incompatible conditions, CSnake performs a local compatibility check that approximately checks the compatibility of the path constraints associated with connected fault propagations with low overhead. CSnake detected 15 bugs that cause self-sustaining cascading failures in five systems, five of which have been confirmed with two fixed.

Tool-augmented LLM agents introduce security risks that extend beyond user-input filtering, including indirect prompt injection through fetched content, unsafe tool execution, credential leakage, and tampering with local control files. We present OpenClaw PRISM, a zero-fork runtime security layer for OpenClaw-based agent gateways. PRISM combines an in-process plugin with optional sidecar services and distributes enforcement across ten lifecycle hooks spanning message ingress, prompt construction, tool execution, tool-result persistence, outbound messaging, sub-agent spawning, and gateway startup. Rather than introducing a novel detection model, PRISM integrates a hybrid heuristic-plus-LLM scanning pipeline, conversation- and session-scoped risk accumulation with TTL-based decay, policy-enforced controls over tools, paths, private networks, domain tiers, and outbound secret patterns, and a tamper-evident audit and operations plane with integrity verification and hot-reloadable policy management. We outline an evaluation methodology and benchmark pipeline for measuring security effectiveness, false positives, layer contribution, runtime overhead, and operational recoverability in an agent-runtime setting, and we report current preliminary benchmark results on curated same-slice experiments and operational microbenchmarks. The system targets deployable runtime defense for real agent gateways rather than benchmark-only detection.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by LLMs promise adaptive, reasoning-driven enterprise workflows, yet granting agents autonomous control over tools, memory, and communication introduces attack surfaces absent from deterministic pipelines. While current research largely addresses prompt-level exploits and narrow individual vectors, it lacks a holistic architectural model for enterprise-grade security. We introduce AgenticCyOps (Securing Multi-Agentic AI Integration in Enterprise Cyber Operations), a framework built on a systematic decomposition of attack surfaces across component, coordination, and protocol layers, revealing that documented vectors consistently trace back to two integration surfaces: tool orchestration and memory management. Building on this observation, we formalize these integration surfaces as primary trust boundaries and define five defensive principles: authorized interfaces, capability scoping, verified execution, memory integrity & synchronization, and access-controlled data isolation; each aligned with established compliance standards (NIST, ISO 27001, GDPR, EU AI Act). We apply the framework to a Security Operations Center (SOC) workflow, adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as the structural basis, with phase-scoped agents, consensus validation loops, and per-organization memory boundaries. Coverage analysis, attack path tracing, and trust boundary assessment confirm that the design addresses the documented attack vectors with defense-in-depth, intercepts three of four representative attack chains within the first two steps, and reduces exploitable trust boundaries by a minimum of 72% compared to a flat MAS, positioning AgenticCyOps as a foundation for securing enterprise-grade integration.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed on mobile devices offer benefits like user privacy and reduced network latency, but introduce a significant security risk: the leakage of proprietary models to end users. To mitigate this risk, we propose a system design for protecting on-device LLMs using Arm Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), TrustZone. Our system addresses two primary challenges: (1) The dilemma between memory efficiency and fast inference (caching model parameters within TEE memory). (2) The lack of efficient and secure Neural Processing Unit (NPU) time-sharing between Rich Execution Environment (REE) and TEE. Our approach incorporates two key innovations. First, we employ pipelined restoration, leveraging the deterministic memory access patterns of LLM inference to prefetch parameters on demand, hiding memory allocation, I/O and decryption latency under computation time. Second, we introduce a co-driver design, creating a minimal data plane NPU driver in the TEE that collaborates with the full-fledged REE driver. This reduces the TEE TCB size and eliminates control plane reinitialization overhead during NPU world switches. We implemented our system on the emerging OpenHarmony OS and the llama.cpp inference framework, and evaluated it with various LLMs on an Arm Rockchip device. Compared to a strawman TEE baseline lacking our optimizations, our system reduces TTFT by up to 90.9% and increases decoding speed by up to 23.2%.

Aligned LLMs are secure, capable of recognizing and refusing to answer malicious questions. However, the role of internal parameters in maintaining such security is not well understood yet, further these models can be vulnerable to security degradation when subjected to fine-tuning attacks. To address these challenges, our work uncovers the mechanism behind security in aligned LLMs at the parameter level, identifying a small set of contiguous layers in the middle of the model that are crucial for distinguishing malicious queries from normal ones, referred to as ``safety layers". We first confirm the existence of these safety layers by analyzing variations in input vectors within the model's internal layers. Additionally, we leverage the over-rejection phenomenon and parameters scaling analysis to precisely locate the safety layers. Building on these findings, we propose a novel fine-tuning approach, Safely Partial-Parameter Fine-Tuning (SPPFT), that fixes the gradient of the safety layers during fine-tuning to address the security degradation. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly preserve LLM security while maintaining performance and reducing computational resources compared to full fine-tuning.

This paper studies the integration off Large Language Models into cybersecurity tools and protocols. The main issue discussed in this paper is how traditional rule-based and signature based security systems are not enough to deal with modern AI powered cyber threats. Cybersecurity industry is changing as threats are becoming more dangerous and adaptive in nature by levering the features provided by AI tools. By integrating LLMs into these tools and protocols, make the systems scalable, context-aware and intelligent. Thus helping it to mitigate these evolving cyber threats. The paper studies the architecture and functioning of LLMs, its integration into Encrypted prompts to prevent prompt injection attacks. It also studies the integration of LLMs into cybersecurity tools using a four layered architecture. At last, the paper has tried to explain various ways of integration LLMs into traditional Intrusion Detection System and enhancing its original abilities in various dimensions. The key findings of this paper has been (i)Encrypted Prompt with LLM is an effective way to mitigate prompt injection attacks, (ii) LLM enhanced cyber security tools are more accurate, scalable and adaptable to new threats as compared to traditional models, (iii) The decoupled model approach for LLM integration into IDS is the best way as it is the most accurate way.

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud paradigm with serverless functions at its core. While serverless environments enable software developers to focus on developing applications without the need to actively manage the underlying runtime infrastructure, they open the door to a wide variety of security threats that can be challenging to mitigate with existing methods. Existing security solutions do not apply to all serverless architectures, since they require significant modifications to the serverless infrastructure or rely on third-party services for the collection of more detailed data. In this paper, we present an extendable serverless security threat detection model that leverages cloud providers' native monitoring tools to detect anomalous behavior in serverless applications. Our model aims to detect compromised serverless functions by identifying post-exploitation abnormal behavior related to different types of attacks on serverless functions, and therefore, it is a last line of defense. Our approach is not tied to any specific serverless application, is agnostic to the type of threats, and is adaptable through model adjustments. To evaluate our model's performance, we developed a serverless cybersecurity testbed in an AWS cloud environment, which includes two different serverless applications and simulates a variety of attack scenarios that cover the main security threats faced by serverless functions. Our evaluation demonstrates our model's ability to detect all implemented attacks while maintaining a negligible false alarm rate.

Over the past year, the vLLM Semantic Router project has released a series of work spanning: (1) core routing mechanisms -- signal-driven routing, context-length pool routing, router performance engineering, policy conflict detection, low-latency embedding models, category-aware semantic caching, user-feedback-driven routing adaptation, hallucination detection, and hierarchical content-safety classification for privacy and jailbreak protection; (2) fleet optimization -- fleet provisioning and energy-efficiency analysis; (3) agentic and multimodal routing -- multimodal agent routing, tool selection, CUA security, and multi-turn context memory and safety; (4) governance and standards -- inference routing protocols and multi-provider API extensions. Each paper tackled a specific problem in LLM inference, but the problems are not independent; for example, fleet provisioning depends on the routing policy, which depends on the workload mix, shifting as organizations adopt agentic and multimodal workloads. This paper distills those results into the Workload-Router-Pool (WRP) architecture, a three-dimensional framework for LLM inference optimization. Workload characterizes what the fleet serves (chat vs. agent, single-turn vs. multi-turn, warm vs. cold, prefill-heavy vs. decode-heavy). Router determines how each request is dispatched (static semantic rules, online bandit adaptation, RL-based model selection, quality-aware cascading). Pool defines where inference runs (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous GPU, disaggregated prefill/decode, KV-cache topology). We map our prior work onto a 3x3 WRP interaction matrix, identify which cells we have covered and which remain open, and propose twenty-one concrete research directions at the intersections, each grounded in our prior measurements, tiered by maturity from engineering-ready to open research.

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces have dramatically expanded capabilities for real-time data retrieval, complex computation, and multi-step orchestration. Yet, the explosive proliferation of plugins, connectors, and inter-agent protocols has outpaced discovery mechanisms and security practices, resulting in brittle integrations vulnerable to diverse threats. In this survey, we introduce the first unified, end-to-end threat model for LLM-agent ecosystems, spanning host-to-tool and agent-to-agent communications, formalize adversary capabilities and attacker objectives, and catalog over thirty attack techniques. Specifically, we organized the threat model into four domains: Input Manipulation (e.g., prompt injections, long-context hijacks, multimodal adversarial inputs), Model Compromise (e.g., prompt- and parameter-level backdoors, composite and encrypted multi-backdoors, poisoning strategies), System and Privacy Attacks (e.g., speculative side-channels, membership inference, retrieval poisoning, social-engineering simulations), and Protocol Vulnerabilities (e.g., exploits in Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol). For each category, we review representative scenarios, assess real-world feasibility, and evaluate existing defenses. Building on our threat taxonomy, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, such as securing MCP deployments through dynamic trust management and cryptographic provenance tracking; designing and hardening Agentic Web Interfaces; and achieving resilience in multi-agent and federated environments. Our work provides a comprehensive reference to guide the design of robust defense mechanisms and establish best practices for resilient LLM-agent workflows.

Tool-augmented LLM agents increasingly rely on multi-step, multi-tool workflows to complete real tasks. This design expands the attack surface, because data produced by one tool can be persisted and later reused as input to another tool, enabling exploitable source-to-sink dataflows that only emerge through tool composition. We study this risk as multi-tool vulnerabilities in LLM agents, and show that existing discovery efforts focused on single-tool or single-hop testing miss these long-horizon behaviors and provide limited debugging value. We present ChainFuzzer, a greybox framework for discovering and reproducing multi-tool vulnerabilities with auditable evidence. ChainFuzzer (i) identifies high-impact operations with strict source-to-sink dataflow evidence and extracts plausible upstream candidate tool chains based on cross-tool dependencies, (ii) uses Trace-guided Prompt Solving (TPS) to synthesize stable prompts that reliably drive the agent to execute target chains, and (iii) performs guardrail-aware fuzzing to reproduce vulnerabilities under LLM guardrails via payload mutation and sink-specific oracles. We evaluate ChainFuzzer on 20 popular open-source LLM agent apps (998 tools). ChainFuzzer extracts 2,388 candidate tool chains and synthesizes 2,213 stable prompts, confirming 365 unique, reproducible vulnerabilities across 19/20 apps (302 require multi-tool execution). Component evaluation shows tool-chain extraction achieves 96.49% edge precision and 91.50% strict chain precision; TPS increases chain reachability from 27.05% to 95.45%; guardrail-aware fuzzing boosts payload-level trigger rate from 18.20% to 88.60%. Overall, ChainFuzzer achieves 3.02 vulnerabilities per 1M tokens, providing a practical foundation for testing and hardening real-world multi-tool agent systems.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are extensively used in critical infrastructures ensuring efficient, reliable, and continuous operations. However, their increasing connectivity and addition of advanced features make them vulnerable to cyber threats, potentially leading to severe disruptions in essential services. In this context, honeypots play a vital role by acting as decoy targets within ICS networks, or on the Internet, helping to detect, log, analyze, and develop mitigations for ICS-specific cyber threats. Deploying ICS honeypots, however, is challenging due to the necessity of accurately replicating industrial protocols and device characteristics, a crucial requirement for effectively mimicking the unique operational behavior of different industrial systems. Moreover, this challenge is compounded by the significant manual effort required in also mimicking the control logic the PLC would execute, in order to capture attacker traffic aiming to disrupt critical infrastructure operations. In this paper, we propose LLMPot, a novel approach for designing honeypots in ICS networks harnessing the potency of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMPot aims to automate and optimize the creation of realistic honeypots with vendor-agnostic configurations, and for any control logic, aiming to eliminate the manual effort and specialized knowledge traditionally required in this domain. We conducted extensive experiments focusing on a wide array of parameters, demonstrating that our LLM-based approach can effectively create honeypot devices implementing different industrial protocols and diverse control logic.

AI agents that pay for resources via the x402 protocol embed payment metadata - resource URLs, descriptions, and reason strings - in every HTTP payment request. This metadata is transmitted to the payment server and to the centralised facilitator API before any on-chain settlement occurs; neither party is typically bound by a data processing agreement. We present presidio-hardened-x402, the first open-source middleware that intercepts x402 payment requests before transmission to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII), enforce declarative spending policies, and block duplicate replay attempts. To evaluate the PII filter, we construct a labeled synthetic corpus of 2,000 x402 metadata triples spanning seven use-case categories, and run a 42-configuration precision/recall sweep across two detection modes (regex, NLP) and five confidence thresholds. The recommended configuration (mode=nlp, min_score=0.4, all entity types) achieves micro-F1 = 0.894 with precision 0.972, at a p99 latency of 5.73ms - well within the 50ms overhead budget. The middleware, corpus, and all experiment code are publicly available at https://github.com/presidio-v/presidio-hardened-x402.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents, autonomously performing tasks within real desktop or web environments. While this evolution greatly expands practical use cases for humans, it also creates serious security exposures. We present SUDO (Screen-based Universal Detox2Tox Offense), a novel attack framework that systematically bypasses refusal-trained safeguards in commercial computer-use agents, such as Claude for Computer Use. The core mechanism, Detox2Tox, transforms harmful requests (that agents initially reject) into seemingly benign requests via detoxification, secures detailed instructions from advanced vision language models (VLMs), and then reintroduces malicious content via toxification just before execution. Unlike conventional jailbreaks, SUDO iteratively refines its attacks based on a built-in refusal feedback, making it increasingly effective against robust policy filters. In extensive tests spanning 50 real-world tasks and multiple state-of-the-art VLMs, SUDO achieves a stark attack success rate of 24.41% (with no refinement), and up to 41.33% (by its iterative refinement) in Claude for Computer Use. By revealing these vulnerabilities and demonstrating the ease with which they can be exploited in real-world computing environments, this paper highlights an immediate need for robust, context-aware safeguards. WARNING: This paper includes harmful or offensive model outputs

The proliferation of pre-trained models (PTMs) and datasets has led to the emergence of centralized model hubs like Hugging Face, which facilitate collaborative development and reuse. However, recent security reports have uncovered vulnerabilities and instances of malicious attacks within these platforms, highlighting growing security concerns. This paper presents the first systematic study of malicious code poisoning attacks on pre-trained model hubs, focusing on the Hugging Face platform. We conduct a comprehensive threat analysis, develop a taxonomy of model formats, and perform root cause analysis of vulnerable formats. While existing tools like Fickling and ModelScan offer some protection, they face limitations in semantic-level analysis and comprehensive threat detection. To address these challenges, we propose MalHug, an end-to-end pipeline tailored for Hugging Face that combines dataset loading script extraction, model deserialization, in-depth taint analysis, and heuristic pattern matching to detect and classify malicious code poisoning attacks in datasets and models. In collaboration with Ant Group, a leading financial technology company, we have implemented and deployed MalHug on a mirrored Hugging Face instance within their infrastructure, where it has been operational for over three months. During this period, MalHug has monitored more than 705K models and 176K datasets, uncovering 91 malicious models and 9 malicious dataset loading scripts. These findings reveal a range of security threats, including reverse shell, browser credential theft, and system reconnaissance. This work not only bridges a critical gap in understanding the security of the PTM supply chain but also provides a practical, industry-tested solution for enhancing the security of pre-trained model hubs.

Prompt injection remains a central obstacle to the safe deployment of large language models, particularly in multi-agent settings where intermediate outputs can propagate or amplify malicious instructions. Building on earlier work that introduced a four-metric Total Injection Vulnerability Score (TIVS), this paper extends the evaluation framework with semantic similarity-based caching and a fifth metric (Observability Score Ratio) to yield TIVS-O, investigating how defence effectiveness interacts with transparency in a HOPE-inspired Nested Learning architecture. The proposed system combines an agentic pipeline with Continuum Memory Systems that implement semantic similarity-based caching across 301 synthetically generated injection-focused prompts drawn from ten attack families, while a fourth agent performs comprehensive security analysis using five key performance indicators. In addition to traditional injection metrics, OSR quantifies the richness and clarity of security-relevant reasoning exposed by each agent, enabling an explicit analysis of trade-offs between strict mitigation and auditability. Experiments show that the system achieves secure responses with zero high-risk breaches, while semantic caching delivers substantial computational savings, achieving a 41.6% reduction in LLM calls and corresponding decreases in latency, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. Five TIVS-O configurations reveal optimal trade-offs between mitigation strictness and forensic transparency. These results indicate that observability-aware evaluation can reveal non-monotonic effects within multi-agent pipelines and that memory-augmented agents can jointly maximize security robustness, real-time performance, operational cost savings, and environmental sustainability without modifying underlying model weights, providing a production-ready pathway for secure and green LLM deployments.

The widespread lack of broad source code verification on blockchain explorers such as Etherscan, where despite 78,047,845 smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (as of May 26, 2025), a mere 767,520 (< 1%) are open source, presents a severe impediment to blockchain security. This opacity necessitates the automated semantic analysis of on-chain smart contract bytecode, a fundamental research challenge with direct implications for identifying vulnerabilities and understanding malicious behavior. Prevailing decompilers struggle to reverse bytecode in a readable manner, often yielding convoluted code that critically hampers vulnerability analysis and thwarts efforts to dissect contract functionalities for security auditing. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a pioneering decompilation pipeline that, for the first time, successfully leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode into human-readable and semantically faithful Solidity code. Our novel methodology first employs rigorous static program analysis to convert bytecode into a structured three-address code (TAC) representation. This intermediate representation then guides a Llama-3.2-3B model, specifically fine-tuned on a comprehensive dataset of 238,446 TAC-to-Solidity function pairs, to generate high-quality Solidity. This approach uniquely recovers meaningful variable names, intricate control flow, and precise function signatures. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates a significant leap beyond traditional decompilers, achieving an average semantic similarity of 0.82 with original source and markedly superior readability. The practical viability and effectiveness of our research are demonstrated through its implementation in a publicly accessible system, available at https://evmdecompiler.com.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed software development and automated code generation. Motivated by these advancements, this paper explores the feasibility of LLMs in modifying malware source code to generate variants. We introduce LLMalMorph, a semi-automated framework that leverages semantical and syntactical code comprehension by LLMs to generate new malware variants. LLMalMorph extracts function-level information from the malware source code and employs custom-engineered prompts coupled with strategically defined code transformations to guide the LLM in generating variants without resource-intensive fine-tuning. To evaluate LLMalMorph, we collected 10 diverse Windows malware samples of varying types, complexity and functionality and generated 618 variants. Our thorough experiments demonstrate that it is possible to reduce the detection rates of antivirus engines of these malware variants to some extent while preserving malware functionalities. In addition, despite not optimizing against any Machine Learning (ML)-based malware detectors, several variants also achieved notable attack success rates against an ML-based malware classifier. We also discuss the limitations of current LLM capabilities in generating malware variants from source code and assess where this emerging technology stands in the broader context of malware variant generation.

Scams exploiting real-time social engineering -- such as phishing, impersonation, and phone fraud -- remain a persistent and evolving threat across digital platforms. Existing defenses are largely reactive, offering limited protection during active interactions. We propose a privacy-preserving, AI-in-the-loop framework that proactively detects and disrupts scam conversations in real time. The system combines instruction-tuned artificial intelligence with a safety-aware utility function that balances engagement with harm minimization, and employs federated learning to enable continual model updates without raw data sharing. Experimental evaluations show that the system produces fluent and engaging responses (perplexity as low as 22.3, engagement approx0.80), while human studies confirm significant gains in realism, safety, and effectiveness over strong baselines. In federated settings, models trained with FedAvg sustain up to 30 rounds while preserving high engagement (approx0.80), strong relevance (approx0.74), and low PII leakage (leq0.0085). Even with differential privacy, novelty and safety remain stable, indicating that robust privacy can be achieved without sacrificing performance. The evaluation of guard models (LlamaGuard, LlamaGuard2/3, MD-Judge) shows a straightforward pattern: stricter moderation settings reduce the chance of exposing personal information, but they also limit how much the model engages in conversation. In contrast, more relaxed settings allow longer and richer interactions, which improve scam detection, but at the cost of higher privacy risk. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify real-time scam-baiting, federated privacy preservation, and calibrated safety moderation into a proactive defense paradigm.

AI assistants produce vulnerable code in 45% of security-relevant scenarios, introducing flaws into production systems at scale. Yet existing secure coding datasets fall short. They lack incident grounding, don't provide the scale modern training requires, and miss the operational security context developers need for production deployments. We present SecureCode v2.0, a production-grade dataset of 1,215 security-focused coding examples that passed structural validation and expert security review. Every example ties to actual documented security incidents with CVE references, provides vulnerable and secure implementations, demonstrates concrete attacks, and includes defense-in-depth operational guidance. The dataset covers 11 vulnerability categories (complete OWASP Top 10:2025 plus AI/ML Security Threats) across 11 languages (Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, PHP, C#, TypeScript, Ruby, Rust, Kotlin, and YAML for infrastructure-as-code). Our quality assurance framework ensures complete incident grounding. Each example includes SIEM integration strategies, infrastructure hardening recommendations (Docker, AppArmor, WAF configurations), and testing approaches using language-appropriate frameworks. The dataset uses a 4-turn conversational structure mirroring actual developer-AI interactions, escalating from basic implementations to advanced security considerations and defense-in-depth guidance. Our contributions: (1) 1,215 rigorously validated examples split into 989 training, 122 validation, and 104 test sets, (2) an automated validation framework ensuring dataset consistency, (3) a 4-turn conversational structure capturing realistic security workflows, (4) comprehensive operational security guidance with SIEM integration strategies, (5) complete language-specific implementation fidelity, and (6) open-source release of data, validation tools, and benchmarking protocols.

We introduce xLLM, an intelligent and efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference framework designed for high-performance, large-scale enterprise-grade serving, with deep optimizations for diverse AI accelerators. To address these challenges, xLLM builds a novel decoupled service-engine architecture. At the service layer, xLLM-Service features an intelligent scheduling module that efficiently processes multimodal requests and co-locates online and offline tasks through unified elastic scheduling to maximize cluster utilization. This module also relies on a workload-adaptive dynamic Prefill-Decode (PD) disaggregation policy and a novel Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) disaggregation policy designed for multimodal inputs. Furthermore, it incorporates a distributed architecture to provide global KV Cache management and robust fault-tolerant capabilities for high availability. At the engine layer, xLLM-Engine co-optimizes system and algorithm designs to fully saturate computing resources. This is achieved through comprehensive multi-layer execution pipeline optimizations, an adaptive graph mode and an xTensor memory management. xLLM-Engine also further integrates algorithmic enhancements such as optimized speculative decoding and dynamic EPLB, collectively serving to substantially boost throughput and inference efficiency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that xLLM delivers significantly superior performance and resource efficiency. Under identical TPOT constraints, xLLM achieves throughput up to 1.7x that of MindIE and 2.2x that of vLLM-Ascend with Qwen-series models, while maintaining an average throughput of 1.7x that of MindIE with Deepseek-series models. xLLM framework is publicly available at https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm and https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm-service.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) demonstrate increasing integration into next-generation applications, but their safety in backdoor attacks remains largely underexplored. However, existing research has focused exclusively on single-agent backdoor attacks, overlooking the novel attack surfaces introduced by agent collaboration in MAS. To bridge this gap, we present the first Distributed Backdoor Attack tailored to MAS. We decompose the backdoor into multiple distributed attack primitives that are embedded within MAS tools. These primitives remain dormant individually but collectively activate only when agents collaborate in a specific sequence, thereby assembling the full backdoor to execute targeted attacks such as data exfiltration. To fully assess this threat, we introduce a benchmark for multi-role collaborative tasks and a sandboxed framework to evaluate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack achieves an attack success rate exceeding 95% without degrading performance on benign tasks. This work exposes novel backdoor attack surfaces that exploit agent collaboration, underscoring the need to move beyond single-agent protection. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/Distributed-Backdoor-Attacks-in-MAS.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic systems that interact with an external environment. However, LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks when handling untrusted data. In this paper we propose CaMeL, a robust defense that creates a protective system layer around the LLM, securing it even when underlying models may be susceptible to attacks. To operate, CaMeL explicitly extracts the control and data flows from the (trusted) query; therefore, the untrusted data retrieved by the LLM can never impact the program flow. To further improve security, CaMeL relies on a notion of a capability to prevent the exfiltration of private data over unauthorized data flows. We demonstrate effectiveness of CaMeL by solving 67% of tasks with provable security in AgentDojo [NeurIPS 2024], a recent agentic security benchmark.

Two widely adopted techniques for LLM inference serving systems today are hybrid batching and disaggregated serving. A hybrid batch combines prefill and decode tokens of different requests in the same batch to improve resource utilization and throughput at the cost of increased latency per token. In contrast, disaggregated serving decouples compute-bound prefill and bandwidth-bound decode phases to optimize for service level objectives (SLOs) at the cost of resource under-utilization and KV-cache transfer overheads. To address the limitations of these techniques, we propose RAPID-Serve: a technique to concurrently execute prefill and decode on the same GPU(s) to meet latency SLOs while maintaining high throughput and efficient resource utilization. Furthermore, we propose Adaptive Resource Management for runtime compute resource allocation, optionally leveraging CU masking (a fine-grained Compute Unit partitioning feature on AMD InstinctTM GPUs). RAPID-Serve provides up to 4.1x (average 1.7x) unconstrained throughput improvement and 32x and higher (average 4.9x) throughput improvement under SLO constraints, showing it as an effective strategy compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into AI agents that interact with external tools and environments to perform complex tasks. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the de facto standard for connecting agents with such resources, but security has lagged behind: thousands of MCP servers execute with unrestricted access to host systems, creating a broad attack surface. In this paper, we introduce AgentBound, the first access control framework for MCP servers. AgentBound combines a declarative policy mechanism, inspired by the Android permission model, with a policy enforcement engine that contains malicious behavior without requiring MCP server modifications. We build a dataset containing the 296 most popular MCP servers, and show that access control policies can be generated automatically from source code with 80.9% accuracy. We also show that AgentBound blocks the majority of security threats in several malicious MCP servers, and that policy enforcement engine introduces negligible overhead. Our contributions provide developers and project managers with a practical foundation for securing MCP servers while maintaining productivity, enabling researchers and tool builders to explore new directions for declarative access control and MCP security.

Multi-agent systems face a fundamental architectural flaw: agent identity is bound to network location. When agents migrate between providers, scale across instances, or federate across organizations, URI-based identity schemes break references, fragment audit trails, and require centralized coordination. We propose the agent:// URI scheme, which decouples identity from topology through three orthogonal components: a trust root establishing organizational authority, a hierarchical capability path enabling semantic discovery, and a sortable unique identifier providing stable reference. The scheme enables capability-based discovery through DHT key derivation, where queries return agents by what they do rather than where they are. Trust-root scoping prevents cross-organization pollution while permitting federation when desired. Cryptographic attestation via PASETO tokens binds capability claims to agent identity, enabling verification without real-time contact with the issuing authority. We evaluate the scheme across four dimensions: capability expressiveness (100% coverage on 369 production tools with zero collision), discovery precision (F1=1.0 across 10,000 agents), identity stability (formal proofs of migration invariance), and performance (all operations under 5 microseconds). The agent:// URI scheme provides a formally-specified, practically-evaluated foundation for decentralized agent identity and capability-based discovery.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled powerful autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-modal tool use. Despite their growing capabilities, today's agent frameworks remain fragile, lacking principled mechanisms for secure information flow, reliability, and multi-agent coordination. In this work, we introduce SAFEFLOW, a new protocol-level framework for building trustworthy LLM/VLM-based agents. SAFEFLOW enforces fine-grained information flow control (IFC), precisely tracking provenance, integrity, and confidentiality of all the data exchanged between agents, tools, users, and environments. By constraining LLM reasoning to respect these security labels, SAFEFLOW prevents untrusted or adversarial inputs from contaminating high-integrity decisions. To ensure robustness in concurrent multi-agent settings, SAFEFLOW introduces transactional execution, conflict resolution, and secure scheduling over shared state, preserving global consistency across agents. We further introduce mechanisms, including write-ahead logging, rollback, and secure caches, that further enhance resilience against runtime errors and policy violations. To validate the performances, we built SAFEFLOWBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate agent reliability under adversarial, noisy, and concurrent operational conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that agents built with SAFEFLOW maintain impressive task performance and security guarantees even in hostile environments, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art. Together, SAFEFLOW and SAFEFLOWBENCH lay the groundwork for principled, robust, and secure agent ecosystems, advancing the frontier of reliable autonomy.

The rapid evolution of cyber threats necessitates innovative solutions for detecting and analyzing malicious activity. Honeypots, which are decoy systems designed to lure and interact with attackers, have emerged as a critical component in cybersecurity. In this paper, we present a novel approach to creating realistic and interactive honeypot systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). By fine-tuning a pre-trained open-source language model on a diverse dataset of attacker-generated commands and responses, we developed a honeypot capable of sophisticated engagement with attackers. Our methodology involved several key steps: data collection and processing, prompt engineering, model selection, and supervised fine-tuning to optimize the model's performance. Evaluation through similarity metrics and live deployment demonstrated that our approach effectively generates accurate and informative responses. The results highlight the potential of LLMs to revolutionize honeypot technology, providing cybersecurity professionals with a powerful tool to detect and analyze malicious activity, thereby enhancing overall security infrastructure.

Continuous fuzzing platforms such as OSS-Fuzz uncover large numbers of vulnerabilities, yet the subsequent repair process remains largely manual. Unfortunately, existing Automated Vulnerability Repair (AVR) techniques -- including recent LLM-based systems -- are not directly applicable to continuous fuzzing. This is because these systems are designed and evaluated on a static, single-run benchmark setting, making them ill-suited for the diverse, noisy, and failure-prone environments in continuous fuzzing. To address these issues, we introduce PatchIsland, a system for Continuous Vulnerability Repair (CVR) that tightly integrates with continuous fuzzing pipelines. PatchIsland employs an ensemble of diverse LLM agents. By leveraging multiple LLM agents, PatchIsland can cover a wider range of settings (e.g., different projects, bug types, and programming languages) and also improve operational robustness. In addition, PatchIsland utilizes a two-phase patch-based deduplication to mitigate duplicate crashes and patches, which can be problematic in continuous fuzzing. In our internal evaluation, PatchIsland repaired 84 of 92 vulnerabilities, demonstrating strong repair capability. In the official AIxCC competition, the system operated with no human intervention in a fully autonomous environment and successfully patched 31 out of 43 vulnerabilities, achieving a repair rate of 72.1\%.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a universal standard that enables AI agents to seamlessly connect with external tools, significantly enhancing their functionality. However, while MCP brings notable benefits, it also introduces significant vulnerabilities, such as Tool Poisoning Attacks (TPA), where hidden malicious instructions exploit the sycophancy of large language models (LLMs) to manipulate agent behavior. Despite these risks, current academic research on MCP security remains limited, with most studies focusing on narrow or qualitative analyses that fail to capture the diversity of real-world threats. To address this gap, we present the MCP Attack Library (MCPLIB), which categorizes and implements 31 distinct attack methods under four key classifications: direct tool injection, indirect tool injection, malicious user attacks, and LLM inherent attack. We further conduct a quantitative analysis of the efficacy of each attack. Our experiments reveal key insights into MCP vulnerabilities, including agents' blind reliance on tool descriptions, sensitivity to file-based attacks, chain attacks exploiting shared context, and difficulty distinguishing external data from executable commands. These insights, validated through attack experiments, underscore the urgency for robust defense strategies and informed MCP design. Our contributions include 1) constructing a comprehensive MCP attack taxonomy, 2) introducing a unified attack framework MCPLIB, and 3) conducting empirical vulnerability analysis to enhance MCP security mechanisms. This work provides a foundational framework, supporting the secure evolution of MCP ecosystems.

Modern language models (LMs) have gained widespread acceptance in everyday and professional contexts, particularly in programming. An essential procedure enabling this adoption is instruction tuning, which substantially enhances LMs' practical utility by training them to follow user instructions and human preferences. However, existing instruction tuning schemes overlook a crucial aspect: the security of generated code. As a result, even the state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LMs frequently produce unsafe code, posing significant security risks. In this work, we introduce SafeCoder to address this gap. SafeCoder performs security-centric fine-tuning using a diverse and high-quality dataset that we collected using an automated pipeline. We integrate the security fine-tuning with standard instruction tuning, to facilitate a joint optimization of both security and utility. Despite its simplicity, we show that SafeCoder is effective across a variety of popular LMs and datasets. It is able to drastically improve security (by about 30%), while preserving utility.

While the deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-value industries continues to expand, the systematic assessment of their safety against jailbreak and prompt-based attacks remains insufficient. Existing safety evaluation benchmarks and frameworks are often limited by an imbalanced integration of core components (attack, defense, and evaluation methods) and an isolation between flexible evaluation frameworks and standardized benchmarking capabilities. These limitations hinder reliable cross-study comparisons and create unnecessary overhead for comprehensive risk assessment. To address these gaps, we present TeleAI-Safety, a modular and reproducible framework coupled with a systematic benchmark for rigorous LLM safety evaluation. Our framework integrates a broad collection of 19 attack methods (including one self-developed method), 29 defense methods, and 19 evaluation methods (including one self-developed method). With a curated attack corpus of 342 samples spanning 12 distinct risk categories, the TeleAI-Safety benchmark conducts extensive evaluations across 14 target models. The results reveal systematic vulnerabilities and model-specific failure cases, highlighting critical trade-offs between safety and utility, and identifying potential defense patterns for future optimization. In practical scenarios, TeleAI-Safety can be flexibly adjusted with customized attack, defense, and evaluation combinations to meet specific demands. We release our complete code and evaluation results to facilitate reproducible research and establish unified safety baselines.

Autonomous code agents built on large language models are reshaping software and AI development through tool use, long-horizon reasoning, and self-directed interaction. However, this autonomy introduces a previously unrecognized security risk: agentic interaction fundamentally expands the LLM attack surface, enabling systematic probing and recovery of hidden system prompts that guide model behavior. We identify system prompt extraction as an emergent vulnerability intrinsic to code agents and present \textsc{JustAsk}, a self-evolving framework that autonomously discovers effective extraction strategies through interaction alone. Unlike prior prompt-engineering or dataset-based attacks, JustAsk requires no handcrafted prompts, labeled supervision, or privileged access beyond standard user interaction. It formulates extraction as an online exploration problem, using Upper Confidence Bound-based strategy selection and a hierarchical skill space spanning atomic probes and high-level orchestration. These skills exploit imperfect system-instruction generalization and inherent tensions between helpfulness and safety. Evaluated on 41 black-box commercial models across multiple providers, JustAsk consistently achieves full or near-complete system prompt recovery, revealing recurring design- and architecture-level vulnerabilities. Our results expose system prompts as a critical yet largely unprotected attack surface in modern agent systems.

Indirect prompt injection threatens LLM agents by embedding malicious instructions in external content, enabling unauthorized actions and data theft. LLM agents maintain working memory through their context window, which stores interaction history for decision-making. Conventional agents indiscriminately accumulate all tool outputs and reasoning traces in this memory, creating two critical vulnerabilities: (1) injected instructions persist throughout the workflow, granting attackers multiple opportunities to manipulate behavior, and (2) verbose, non-essential content degrades decision-making capabilities. Existing defenses treat bloated memory as given and focus on remaining resilient, rather than reducing unnecessary accumulation to prevent the attack. We present AgentSys, a framework that defends against indirect prompt injection through explicit memory management. Inspired by process memory isolation in operating systems, AgentSys organizes agents hierarchically: a main agent spawns worker agents for tool calls, each running in an isolated context and able to spawn nested workers for subtasks. External data and subtask traces never enter the main agent's memory; only schema-validated return values can cross boundaries through deterministic JSON parsing. Ablations show isolation alone cuts attack success to 2.19%, and adding a validator/sanitizer further improves defense with event-triggered checks whose overhead scales with operations rather than context length. On AgentDojo and ASB, AgentSys achieves 0.78% and 4.25% attack success while slightly improving benign utility over undefended baselines. It remains robust to adaptive attackers and across multiple foundation models, showing that explicit memory management enables secure, dynamic LLM agent architectures. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ruoyaow/agentsys-memory.

Current evaluations of defenses against prompt attacks in large language model (LLM) applications often overlook two critical factors: the dynamic nature of adversarial behavior and the usability penalties imposed on legitimate users by restrictive defenses. We propose D-SEC (Dynamic Security Utility Threat Model), which explicitly separates attackers from legitimate users, models multi-step interactions, and expresses the security-utility in an optimizable form. We further address the shortcomings in existing evaluations by introducing Gandalf, a crowd-sourced, gamified red-teaming platform designed to generate realistic, adaptive attack. Using Gandalf, we collect and release a dataset of 279k prompt attacks. Complemented by benign user data, our analysis reveals the interplay between security and utility, showing that defenses integrated in the LLM (e.g., system prompts) can degrade usability even without blocking requests. We demonstrate that restricted application domains, defense-in-depth, and adaptive defenses are effective strategies for building secure and useful LLM applications.

Prompt leakage poses a compelling security and privacy threat in LLM applications. Leakage of system prompts may compromise intellectual property, and act as adversarial reconnaissance for an attacker. A systematic evaluation of prompt leakage threats and mitigation strategies is lacking, especially for multi-turn LLM interactions. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLM vulnerabilities against prompt leakage for 10 closed- and open-source LLMs, across four domains. We design a unique threat model which leverages the LLM sycophancy effect and elevates the average attack success rate (ASR) from 17.7% to 86.2% in a multi-turn setting. Our standardized setup further allows dissecting leakage of specific prompt contents such as task instructions and knowledge documents. We measure the mitigation effect of 7 black-box defense strategies, along with finetuning an open-source model to defend against leakage attempts. We present different combination of defenses against our threat model, including a cost analysis. Our study highlights key takeaways for building secure LLM applications and provides directions for research in multi-turn LLM interactions

Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents, exemplified by OpenClaw, demonstrate remarkable capabilities in executing complex, long-horizon tasks. However, their tightly coupled instant-messaging interaction paradigm and high-privilege execution capabilities substantially expand the system attack surface. In this paper, we present a comprehensive security threat analysis of OpenClaw. To structure our analysis, we introduce a five-layer lifecycle-oriented security framework that captures key stages of agent operation, i.e., initialization, input, inference, decision, and execution, and systematically examine compound threats across the agent's operational lifecycle, including indirect prompt injection, skill supply chain contamination, memory poisoning, and intent drift. Through detailed case studies on OpenClaw, we demonstrate the prevalence and severity of these threats and analyze the limitations of existing defenses. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in current point-based defense mechanisms when addressing cross-temporal and multi-stage systemic risks, highlighting the need for holistic security architectures for autonomous LLM agents. Within this framework, we further examine representative defense strategies at each lifecycle stage, including plugin vetting frameworks, context-aware instruction filtering, memory integrity validation protocols, intent verification mechanisms, and capability enforcement architectures.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous, tool-calling agents has fundamentally altered the cybersecurity landscape. Frameworks like OpenClaw grant AI systems operating-system-level permissions and the autonomy to execute complex workflows. This level of access creates unprecedented security challenges. Consequently, traditional content-filtering defenses have become obsolete. This report presents a comprehensive security analysis of the OpenClaw ecosystem. We systematically investigate its current threat landscape, highlighting critical vulnerabilities such as prompt injection-driven Remote Code Execution (RCE), sequential tool attack chains, context amnesia, and supply chain contamination. To systematically contextualize these threats, we propose a novel tri-layered risk taxonomy for autonomous Agents, categorizing vulnerabilities across AI Cognitive, Software Execution, and Information System dimensions. To address these systemic architectural flaws, we introduce the Full-Lifecycle Agent Security Architecture (FASA). This theoretical defense blueprint advocates for zero-trust agentic execution, dynamic intent verification, and cross-layer reasoning-action correlation. Building on this framework, we present Project ClawGuard, our ongoing engineering initiative. This project aims to implement the FASA paradigm and transition autonomous agents from high-risk experimental utilities into trustworthy systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/NY1024/ClawGuard.

Large Language Models have emerged as transformative tools for Security Operations Centers, enabling automated log analysis, phishing triage, and malware explanation; however, deployment in adversarial cybersecurity environments exposes critical vulnerabilities to prompt injection attacks where malicious instructions embedded in security artifacts manipulate model behavior. This paper introduces SecureCAI, a novel defense framework extending Constitutional AI principles with security-aware guardrails, adaptive constitution evolution, and Direct Preference Optimization for unlearning unsafe response patterns, addressing the unique challenges of high-stakes security contexts where traditional safety mechanisms prove insufficient against sophisticated adversarial manipulation. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that SecureCAI reduces attack success rates by 94.7% compared to baseline models while maintaining 95.1% accuracy on benign security analysis tasks, with the framework incorporating continuous red-teaming feedback loops enabling dynamic adaptation to emerging attack strategies and achieving constitution adherence scores exceeding 0.92 under sustained adversarial pressure, thereby establishing a foundation for trustworthy integration of language model capabilities into operational cybersecurity workflows and addressing a critical gap in current approaches to AI safety within adversarial domains.

We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them.

The advancement of graph-based malware analysis is critically limited by the absence of large-scale datasets that capture the inherent hierarchical structure of software. Existing methods often oversimplify programs into single level graphs, failing to model the crucial semantic relationship between high-level functional interactions and low-level instruction logic. To bridge this gap, we introduce \dataset, the largest public hierarchical graph dataset for malware analysis, comprising over 200M Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) nested within 595K Function Call Graphs (FCGs). This two-level representation preserves structural semantics essential for building robust detectors resilient to code obfuscation and malware evolution. We demonstrate HiGraph's utility through a large-scale analysis that reveals distinct structural properties of benign and malicious software, establishing it as a foundational benchmark for the community. The dataset and tools are publicly available at https://higraph.org.

Today's LLMs are susceptible to prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other attacks that allow adversaries to overwrite a model's original instructions with their own malicious prompts. In this work, we argue that one of the primary vulnerabilities underlying these attacks is that LLMs often consider system prompts (e.g., text from an application developer) to be the same priority as text from untrusted users and third parties. To address this, we propose an instruction hierarchy that explicitly defines how models should behave when instructions of different priorities conflict. We then propose a data generation method to demonstrate this hierarchical instruction following behavior, which teaches LLMs to selectively ignore lower-privileged instructions. We apply this method to GPT-3.5, showing that it drastically increases robustness -- even for attack types not seen during training -- while imposing minimal degradations on standard capabilities.

With the increasing usage of open-source software (OSS) components, vulnerabilities embedded within them are propagated to a huge number of underlying applications. In practice, the timely application of security patches in downstream software is challenging. The main reason is that such patches do not explicitly indicate their security impacts in the documentation, which would be difficult to recognize for software maintainers and users. However, attackers can still identify these "secret" security patches by analyzing the source code and generate corresponding exploits to compromise not only unpatched versions of the current software, but also other similar software packages that may contain the same vulnerability due to code cloning or similar design/implementation logic. Therefore, it is critical to identify these secret security patches to enable timely fixes. To this end, we propose a deep learning-based defense system called PatchRNN to automatically identify secret security patches in OSS. Besides considering descriptive keywords in the commit message (i.e., at the text level), we leverage both syntactic and semantic features at the source-code level. To evaluate the performance of our system, we apply it on a large-scale real-world patch dataset and conduct a case study on a popular open-source web server software - NGINX. Experimental results show that the PatchRNN can successfully detect secret security patches with a low false positive rate.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly interact, collaborate, and delegate tasks to one another autonomously with minimal human interaction. Industry guidelines for agentic system governance emphasize the need for users to maintain comprehensive control over their agents, mitigating potential damage from malicious agents. Several proposed agentic system designs address agent identity, authorization, and delegation, but remain purely theoretical, without concrete implementation and evaluation. Most importantly, they do not provide user-controlled agent management. To address this gap, we propose SAGA, a scalable Security Architecture for Governing Agentic systems, that offers user oversight over their agents' lifecycle. In our design, users register their agents with a central entity, the Provider, that maintains agent contact information, user-defined access control policies, and helps agents enforce these policies on inter-agent communication. We introduce a cryptographic mechanism for deriving access control tokens, that offers fine-grained control over an agent's interaction with other agents, providing formal security guarantees. We evaluate SAGA on several agentic tasks, using agents in different geolocations, and multiple on-device and cloud LLMs, demonstrating minimal performance overhead with no impact on underlying task utility in a wide range of conditions. Our architecture enables secure and trustworthy deployment of autonomous agents, accelerating the responsible adoption of this technology in sensitive environments.

Tool-using LLM agents increasingly coordinate real workloads by selecting and chaining third-party tools based on text-visible metadata such as tool names, descriptions, and return messages. We show that this convenience creates a supply-chain attack surface: a malicious MCP tool server can be co-registered alongside normal tools and induce overthinking loops, where individually trivial or plausible tool calls compose into cyclic trajectories that inflate end-to-end tokens and latency without any single step looking abnormal. We formalize this as a structural overthinking attack, distinguishable from token-level verbosity, and implement 14 malicious tools across three servers that trigger repetition, forced refinement, and distraction. Across heterogeneous registries and multiple tool-capable models, the attack causes severe resource amplification (up to 142.4times tokens) and can degrade task outcomes. Finally, we find that decoding-time concision controls do not reliably prevent loop induction, suggesting defenses should reason about tool-call structure rather than tokens alone.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly become integral to real-world applications, powering services across diverse sectors. However, their widespread deployment has exposed critical security risks, particularly through jailbreak prompts that can bypass model alignment and induce harmful outputs. Despite intense research into both attack and defense techniques, the field remains fragmented: definitions, threat models, and evaluation criteria vary widely, impeding systematic progress and fair comparison. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK), we address these challenges by (1) proposing a holistic, multi-level taxonomy that organizes attacks, defenses, and vulnerabilities in LLM prompt security; (2) formalizing threat models and cost assumptions into machine-readable profiles for reproducible evaluation; (3) introducing an open-source evaluation toolkit for standardized, auditable comparison of attacks and defenses; (4) releasing JAILBREAKDB, the largest annotated dataset of jailbreak and benign prompts to date; and (5) presenting a comprehensive evaluation and leaderboard of state-of-the-art methods. Our work unifies fragmented research, provides rigorous foundations for future studies, and supports the development of robust, trustworthy LLMs suitable for high-stakes deployment.

Large language model (LLM) agents face a structural tension: cloud agents provide strong reasoning but expose user data, while on-device agents preserve privacy at the cost of overall capability. Existing device-cloud designs treat this boundary as a compute split rather than a trust boundary suited to agentic workloads, and existing sanitizers force a choice between policy flexibility and the structural fidelity tool calls require. In this work, we develop PAAC, a privacy-aware agentic framework that aligns planner--executor decomposition with the device-cloud boundary so that role specialization itself becomes the privacy mechanism. The cloud agent reasons over typed placeholder tokens that preserve each sensitive value's reasoning role while discarding its content, while the on-device agent identifies sensitive spans and distills each step's execution outcome into compact key findings. Sanitization confines the on-device LLM to proposing which spans to mask, while a deterministic registry performs all substitution and reversal, keeping actions directly executable on device. On three agentic benchmarks under strict privacy settings, PAAC dominates the Pareto frontier of privacy and accuracy, improving average accuracy by 15-36\% and reducing average leakage by 2-6times over state-of-the-art device-cloud baselines, with the largest margins on privacy targets outside fixed entity taxonomies. We find consistent improvements on 17 additional benchmarks spanning 10 domains, including math, science, and finance.

With the rapid evolution of foundation models, Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated increasingly powerful tool-use capabilities. However, this proficiency introduces significant security risks, as malicious actors can manipulate agents into executing tools to generate harmful content. While existing defensive mechanisms are effective, they frequently suffer from the over-refusal problem, where increased safety strictness compromises the agent's utility on benign tasks. To mitigate this trade-off, we propose SafeHarbor, a novel framework designed to establish precise decision boundaries for LLM agents. Unlike static guidelines, SafeHarbor extracts context-aware defense rules through enhanced adversarial generation. We design a local hierarchical memory system for dynamic rule injection, offering a training-free, efficient, and plug-and-play solution. Furthermore, we introduce an information entropy-based self-evolution mechanism that continuously optimizes the memory structure through dynamic node splitting and merging. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeHarbor achieves state-of-the-art performance on both ambiguous benign tasks and explicit malicious attacks, notably attaining a peak benign utility of 63.6\% on GPT-4o while maintaining a robust refusal rate exceeding 93\% against harmful requests. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ljj-cyber/SafeHarbor.

Tool-augmented LLM agents raise new security risks: tool executions can introduce runtime-only behaviors, including prompt injection and unintended exposure of external inputs (e.g., environment secrets or local files). While existing scanners often focus on static artifacts, analyzing runtime behavior is challenging because directly executing untrusted tools can itself be dangerous. We present MCP-SandboxScan, a lightweight framework motivated by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that safely executes untrusted tools inside a WebAssembly/WASI sandbox and produces auditable reports of external-to-sink exposures. Our prototype (i) extracts LLM-relevant sinks from runtime outputs (prompt/messages and structured tool-return fields), (ii) instantiates external-input candidates from environment values, mounted file contents, and output-surfaced HTTP fetch intents, and (iii) links sources to sinks via snippet-based substring matching. Case studies on three representative tools show that MCP-SandboxScan can surface provenance evidence when external inputs appear in prompt/messages or tool-return payloads, and can expose filesystem capability violations as runtime evidence. We further compare against a lightweight static string-signature baseline and use a micro-benchmark to characterize false negatives under transformations and false positives from short-token collisions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering tasks, but evaluating their effectiveness in vulnerability detection is challenging due to the lack of high-quality datasets. Most existing datasets are limited to function-level labels, ignoring finer-grained vulnerability patterns and crucial contextual information. Also, poor data quality such as mislabeling, inconsistent annotations, and duplicates can lead to inflated performance and weak generalization. Moreover, by including only the functions, these datasets miss broader program context, like data/control dependencies and interprocedural interactions, that are essential for accurately understanding real-world security flaws. Without this context, detection models are evaluated under unrealistic assumptions. To address these limitations, this paper introduces SecVulEval, a benchmark designed to support fine-grained evaluation of LLMs and other detection methods with rich contextual information. SecVulEval focuses on real-world C/C++ vulnerabilities at the statement level. This granularity enables more precise evaluation of a model's ability to localize vulnerabilities, beyond simple binary classification at the function level. By incorporating rich contextual information, SecVulEval sets a new standard for vulnerability detection benchmarks in realistic scenarios. This benchmark includes 25,440 function samples covering 5,867 unique CVEs in C/C++ projects from 1999 to 2024. We evaluated the SOTA LLMs with a multi-agent-based approach. The evaluation on our dataset shows that the models are still far from accurately predicting vulnerable statements in a given function. The best-performing Claude-3.7-Sonnet model achieves 23.83% F1-score for detecting vulnerable statements with correct reasoning. Finally, we analyze the LLM outputs and provide insights into their behavior in vulnerability detection for C/C++.

A multi-agent system (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) can automate tedious user tasks such as meeting scheduling that requires inter-agent collaboration. LLMs enable nuanced protocols that account for unstructured private data, user constraints, and preferences. However, this design introduces new risks, including misalignment and attacks by malicious parties that compromise agents or steal user data. In this paper, we propose the Terrarium framework for fine-grained study on safety, privacy, and security in LLM-based MAS. We repurpose the blackboard design, an early approach in multi-agent systems, to create a modular, configurable testbed for multi-agent collaboration. We identify key attack vectors such as misalignment, malicious agents, compromised communication, and data poisoning. We implement three collaborative MAS scenarios with four representative attacks to demonstrate the framework's flexibility. By providing tools to rapidly prototype, evaluate, and iterate on defenses and designs, Terrarium aims to accelerate progress toward trustworthy multi-agent systems.

As Artificial Intelligence systems evolve from monolithic models to ecosystems of specialized agents, the need for standardized communication protocols becomes increasingly critical. This paper introduces MOD-X (Modular Open Decentralized eXchange), a novel architectural framework proposal for agent interoperability that addresses key limitations of existing protocols. Unlike current approaches, MOD-X proposes a layered architecture with a Universal Message Bus, thorough state management, translation capabilities, and blockchain-based security mechanisms. We present MOD-X's architecture, compare it with existing protocols, and demonstrate its application through a worked example how it enables integration between heterogeneous specialist agents (agents with different architectures, vendors, capabilities, and knowledge representations--including rule-based systems, neural networks, symbolic reasoning engines, and legacy software with agent wrappers). MOD-X's key innovations include a publish-subscribe communication model, semantic capability discovery, and dynamic workflow orchestration--providing a framework that bridges theoretical formalism with practical implementation. This architecture addresses the growing need for truly decentralized, interoperable agent ecosystems that can scale effectively without the need for central coordination.

Large language model (LLM)-powered agents are transforming digital devices from passive tools into proactive intelligent collaborators. However, most existing frameworks remain confined to a single OS or device, making cross-device workflows brittle and largely manual. We present UFO^3, a system that unifies heterogeneous endpoints, desktops, servers, mobile devices, and edge, into a single orchestration fabric. UFO^3 models each user request as a mutable TaskConstellation: a distributed DAG of atomic subtasks (TaskStars) with explicit control and data dependencies (TaskStarLines). The TaskConstellation continuously evolves as results stream in from distributed devices, enabling asynchronous execution, adaptive recovery, and dynamic optimization. A Constellation Orchestrator} executes tasks safely and asynchronously while applying dynamic DAG updates, and the Agent Interaction Protocol (AIP) provides persistent, low-latency channels for reliable task dispatch and result streaming. These designs dissolve the traditional boundaries between devices and platforms, allowing agents to collaborate seamlessly and amplify their collective intelligence. We evaluate UFO^3 on NebulaBench, a benchmark of 55 cross-device tasks across 5 machines and 10 categories. UFO^3 achieves 83.3% subtask completion, 70.9% task success, exposes parallelism with an average width of 1.72, and reduces end-to-end latency by 31% relative to a sequential baseline. Fault-injection experiments demonstrate graceful degradation and recovery under transient and permanent agent failures. These results show that UFO^3 achieves accurate, efficient, and resilient task orchestration across heterogeneous devices, uniting isolated agents into a coherent, adaptive computing fabric that extends across the landscape of ubiquitous computing.

Model merging has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple single-task fine-tuned models into a unified one that can perform well on multiple tasks. However, existing model merging techniques primarily focus on resolving conflicts between task-specific models, they often overlook potential security threats, particularly the risk of backdoor attacks in the open-source model ecosystem. In this paper, we first investigate the vulnerabilities of existing model merging methods to backdoor attacks, identifying two critical challenges: backdoor succession and backdoor transfer. To address these issues, we propose a novel Defense-Aware Merging (DAM) approach that simultaneously mitigates task interference and backdoor vulnerabilities. Specifically, DAM employs a meta-learning-based optimization method with dual masks to identify a shared and safety-aware subspace for model merging. These masks are alternately optimized: the Task-Shared mask identifies common beneficial parameters across tasks, aiming to preserve task-specific knowledge while reducing interference, while the Backdoor-Detection mask isolates potentially harmful parameters to neutralize security threats. This dual-mask design allows us to carefully balance the preservation of useful knowledge and the removal of potential vulnerabilities. Compared to existing merging methods, DAM achieves a more favorable balance between performance and security, reducing the attack success rate by 2-10 percentage points while sacrificing only about 1% in accuracy. Furthermore, DAM exhibits robust performance and broad applicability across various types of backdoor attacks and the number of compromised models involved in the merging process. We will release the codes and models soon.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting cybersecurity tasks, yet existing approaches struggle with automatic vulnerability discovery and exploitation due to limited interaction, weak execution grounding, and a lack of experience reuse. We propose Co-RedTeam, a security-aware multi-agent framework designed to mirror real-world red-teaming workflows by integrating security-domain knowledge, code-aware analysis, execution-grounded iterative reasoning, and long-term memory. Co-RedTeam decomposes vulnerability analysis into coordinated discovery and exploitation stages, enabling agents to plan, execute, validate, and refine actions based on real execution feedback while learning from prior trajectories. Extensive evaluations on challenging security benchmarks demonstrate that Co-RedTeam consistently outperforms strong baselines across diverse backbone models, achieving over 60% success rate in vulnerability exploitation and over 10% absolute improvement in vulnerability detection. Ablation and iteration studies further confirm the critical role of execution feedback, structured interaction, and memory for building robust and generalizable cybersecurity agents.

Software supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem have become increasingly sophisticated, leveraging obfuscation and complex logic to evade traditional detection mechanisms. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for malicious code detection due to their strong capabilities in semantic code understanding. However, the practical deployment of LLMs in this domain is severely constrained by limited context windows and high computational costs. Naive approaches, such as token-based code splitting, often fragment semantic context, leading to degraded detection performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel LLM-based framework for malicious npm package detection that leverages code slicing techniques. A specialized taint-based slicing method tailored to the JavaScript ecosystem is proposed to recover malicious data flows. By isolating security-relevant logic from benign boilerplate code, the approach reduces the input code volume by over 99\% while preserving critical malicious behaviors. The framework is evaluated on a curated dataset comprising over 7000 malicious and benign npm packages. Experimental results using the DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B model demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a detection accuracy of 87.04\%, significantly outperforming a full-package baseline based on naive token splitting (75.41\%). These results indicate that semantically optimized input representations via code slicing not only mitigate the LLM context window bottleneck but also enhance reasoning precision for security analysis, providing an effective defense against evolving open-source software supply chain threats.

In LLM/VLM agents, prompt privacy risk propagates beyond a single model call because raw user content can flow into retrieval queries, memory writes, tool calls, and logs. Existing de-identification pipelines address document boundaries but not this cross-stage propagation. We propose BodhiPromptShield, a policy-aware framework that detects sensitive spans, routes them via typed placeholders, semantic abstraction, or secure symbolic mapping, and delays restoration to authorized boundaries. Relative to enterprise redaction, this adds explicit propagation-aware mediation and restoration timing as a security variable. Under controlled evaluation on the Controlled Prompt-Privacy Benchmark (CPPB), stage-wise propagation suppresses from 10.7\% to 7.1\% across retrieval, memory, and tool stages; PER reaches 9.3\% with 0.94 AC and 0.92 TSR, outperforming generic de-identification. These are controlled systems results on CPPB rather than formal privacy guarantees or public-benchmark transfer claims. The project repository is available at https://github.com/mabo1215/BodhiPromptShield.git.

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.

Reasoning over heterogeneous artifacts (PDFs, spreadsheets, slide decks, etc.) increasingly occurs within structured agent workflows that iteratively extract, transform, and reference external information. In these workflows, uncertainty is not merely an input-quality issue: it can redirect decomposition and routing decisions, reshape intermediate state, and produce qualitatively different execution trajectories. We study this phenomenon by treating uncertainty as a controlled variable: we inject structured perturbations into artifact-derived representations, execute fixed workflows under comprehensive logging, and quantify contamination via trace divergence in plans, tool invocations, and intermediate state. Across 614 paired runs on 32 GAIA tasks with three different language models, we find a decoupling: workflows may diverge substantially yet recover correct answers, or remain structurally similar while producing incorrect outputs. We characterize three manifestation types: silent semantic corruption, behavioral detours with recovery, and combined structural disruption and their control-flow signatures (rerouting, extended execution, early termination). We measure operational costs and characterize why commonly used verification guardrails fail to intercept contamination. We contribute (i) a formal taxonomy of contamination manifestations in structured workflows, (ii) a trace-based measurement framework for detecting and localizing contamination across agent interactions, and (iii) empirical evidence with implications for targeted verification, defensive design, and cost control.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, but their deployment has exposed critical vulnerabilities, particularly to jailbreak attacks that circumvent safety mechanisms. Guardrails--external defense mechanisms that monitor and control LLM interaction--have emerged as a promising solution. However, the current landscape of LLM guardrails is fragmented, lacking a unified taxonomy and comprehensive evaluation framework. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, we present the first holistic analysis of jailbreak guardrails for LLMs. We propose a novel, multi-dimensional taxonomy that categorizes guardrails along six key dimensions, and introduce a Security-Efficiency-Utility evaluation framework to assess their practical effectiveness. Through extensive analysis and experiments, we identify the strengths and limitations of existing guardrail approaches, explore their universality across attack types, and provide insights into optimizing defense combinations. Our work offers a structured foundation for future research and development, aiming to guide the principled advancement and deployment of robust LLM guardrails. The code is available at https://github.com/xunguangwang/SoK4JailbreakGuardrails.

The widespread adoption of cloud-based proprietary large language models (LLMs) has introduced significant challenges, including operational dependencies, privacy concerns, and the necessity of continuous internet connectivity. In this work, we introduce an LLMOps pipeline, "LlamaDuo", for the seamless migration of knowledge and abilities from service-oriented LLMs to smaller, locally manageable models. This pipeline is crucial for ensuring service continuity in the presence of operational failures, strict privacy policies, or offline requirements. Our LlamaDuo involves fine-tuning a small language model against the service LLM using a synthetic dataset generated by the latter. If the performance of the fine-tuned model falls short of expectations, it is enhanced by further fine-tuning with additional similar data created by the service LLM. This iterative process guarantees that the smaller model can eventually match or even surpass the service LLM's capabilities in specific downstream tasks, offering a practical and scalable solution for managing AI deployments in constrained environments. Extensive experiments with leading edge LLMs are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness, adaptability, and affordability of LlamaDuo across various downstream tasks. Our pipeline implementation is available at https://github.com/deep-diver/llamaduo.

This paper introduces the Hazard-Aware System Card (HASC), a novel framework designed to enhance transparency and accountability in the development and deployment of AI systems. The HASC builds upon existing model card and system card concepts by integrating a comprehensive, dynamic record of an AI system's security and safety posture. The framework proposes a standardized system of identifiers, including a novel AI Safety Hazard (ASH) ID, to complement existing security identifiers like CVEs, allowing for clear and consistent communication of fixed flaws. By providing a single, accessible source of truth, the HASC empowers developers and stakeholders to make more informed decisions about AI system safety throughout its lifecycle. Ultimately, we also compare our proposed AI system cards with the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 standard and discuss how they can be used to complement each other, providing greater transparency and accountability for AI systems.

Automating software vulnerability detection (SVD) remains a critical challenge in an era of increasingly complex and interdependent software systems. Despite significant advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code analysis, prevailing evaluation methodologies often lack the context-aware robustness necessary to capture real-world intricacies and cross-component interactions. To address these limitations, we present VulnSage, a comprehensive evaluation framework and a dataset curated from diverse, large-scale open-source system software projects developed in C/C++. Unlike prior datasets, it leverages a heuristic noise pre-filtering approach combined with LLM-based reasoning to ensure a representative and minimally noisy spectrum of vulnerabilities. The framework supports multi-granular analysis across function, file, and inter-function levels and employs four diverse zero-shot prompt strategies: Baseline, Chain-of-Thought, Think, and Think & Verify. Through this evaluation, we uncover that structured reasoning prompts substantially improve LLM performance, with Think & Verify reducing ambiguous responses from 20.3% to 9.1% while increasing accuracy. We further demonstrate that code-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose alternatives, with performance varying significantly across vulnerability types, revealing that no single approach universally excels across all security contexts. Link to dataset and codes: https://github.com/Erroristotle/VulnSage.git

Multi-agent systems perform well on general reasoning tasks. However, the lack of training in specialized areas hinders their accuracy. Current training methods train a unified large language model (LLM) for all agents in the system. This may limit the performances due to different distributions underlying for different agents. Therefore, training multi-agent systems with distinct LLMs should be the next step to solve. However, this approach introduces optimization challenges. For example, agents operate at different frequencies, rollouts involve varying sub-agent invocations, and agents are often deployed across separate servers, disrupting end-to-end gradient flow. To address these issues, we propose M-GRPO, a hierarchical extension of Group Relative Policy Optimization designed for vertical Multi-agent systems with a main agent (planner) and multiple sub-agents (multi-turn tool executors). M-GRPO computes group-relative advantages for both main and sub-agents, maintaining hierarchical credit assignment. It also introduces a trajectory-alignment scheme that generates fixed-size batches despite variable sub-agent invocations. We deploy a decoupled training pipeline in which agents run on separate servers and exchange minimal statistics via a shared store. This enables scalable training without cross-server backpropagation. In experiments on real-world benchmarks (e.g., GAIA, XBench-DeepSearch, and WebWalkerQA), M-GRPO consistently outperforms both single-agent GRPO and multi-agent GRPO with frozen sub-agents, demonstrating improved stability and sample efficiency. These results show that aligning heterogeneous trajectories and decoupling optimization across specialized agents enhances tool-augmented reasoning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personal agents, accessing sensitive user data such as calendars, emails, and medical records. Users currently face a trade-off: They can send private records, many of which are stored in remote databases, to powerful but untrusted LLM providers, increasing their exposure risk. Alternatively, they can run less powerful models locally on trusted devices. We bridge this gap. Our Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning first sends a generic, non-private user query to a powerful, untrusted LLM, which generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt and detailed sub-queries without accessing user data. Next, we embed these sub-queries and perform encrypted sub-second semantic search using our Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Database across one million entries of a single user's private data. This represents a realistic scale of personal documents, emails, and records accumulated over years of digital activity. Finally, we feed the CoT prompt and the decrypted records to a local language model and generate the final response. On the LoCoMo long-context QA benchmark, our hybrid framework, combining GPT-4o with a local Llama-3.2-1B model, outperforms using GPT-4o alone by up to 7.1 percentage points. This demonstrates a first step toward systems where tasks are decomposed and split between untrusted strong LLMs and weak local ones, preserving user privacy.