Agent Vulnerabilities

Large Language Model (LLM) systems integrated with private enterprise data, such as those using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), are vulnerable to multi-stage prompt inference attacks. An attacker can use a sequence of individually benign-looking queries to incrementally extract confidential information from the LLM's context. Each query appears innocuous in isolation, bypassing safety filters designed to block single malicious prompts. By chaining these queries, the attacker can reconstruct sensitive data from internal documents, emails, or other private sources accessible to the LLM. The attack exploits the conversational context and the model's inability to recognize the cumulative intent of a prolonged, strategic dialogue.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking through an agentic attack framework called Composition of Principles (CoP). This technique uses an attacker LLM (Red-Teaming Agent) to dynamically select and combine multiple human-defined, high-level transformations ("principles") into a single, sophisticated prompt. The composition of several simple principles, such as expanding context, rephrasing, and inserting specific phrases, creates complex adversarial prompts that can bypass safety and alignment mechanisms designed to block single-tactic or more direct harmful requests. This allows an attacker to elicit policy-violating or harmful content in a single turn.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks through manipulation of external data sources accessed during task execution. Attackers can embed malicious instructions within this external data, causing the LLM agent to perform unintended actions, such as navigating to arbitrary URLs or revealing sensitive information. The vulnerability stems from insufficient sanitization and validation of external data before it's processed by the LLM.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) used in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) systems are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Adversarially crafted natural language instructions, even when disguised within seemingly benign prompts, can bypass safety mechanisms and cause the VLN agent to perform unintended or harmful actions in both simulated and real-world environments. The attacks exploit the MLLM's ability to follow instructions without sufficient consideration of the consequences of those actions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing alignment-based defenses against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks exhibit vulnerability to an informed white-box attack. This attack, termed Checkpoint-GCG, leverages intermediate model checkpoints from the alignment training process to initialize the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack. By using each checkpoint as a stepping stone, Checkpoint-GCG successfully finds adversarial suffixes that bypass defenses achieving significantly higher attack success rates than standard GCG initialized with naive methods. This is particularly impactful as Checkpoint-GCG can discover universal adversarial suffixes effective across multiple inputs.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are vulnerable to intellectual property (IP) leakage attacks. An attacker with black-box access (only interacting via the public API) can craft adversarial queries that propagate through the MAS, extracting sensitive information such as system prompts, task instructions, tool specifications, number of agents, and system topology.

A vulnerability in multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems allows for a permutation-invariant adversarial prompt attack. By strategically partitioning adversarial prompts and routing them through a network topology, an attacker can bypass distributed safety mechanisms, even those with token bandwidth limitations and asynchronous message delivery. The attack optimizes prompt propagation as a maximum-flow minimum-cost problem, maximizing success while minimizing detection.

LLM agents utilizing external tools are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. Attackers can embed malicious instructions into the external data accessed by the agent, manipulating its behavior even when defenses against direct prompt injection are in place. Adaptive attacks, which modify the injected payload based on the specific defense mechanism, consistently bypass existing defenses with a success rate exceeding 50%.

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) agents that allows attackers to manipulate the agent's reasoning process through the insertion of strategically placed adversarial strings. This allows attackers to induce the agent to perform unintended malicious actions or invoke specific malicious tools, even when the initial prompt or instruction is benign. The attack exploits the agent's reliance on chain-of-thought reasoning and dynamically optimizes the adversarial string to maximize the likelihood of the agent incorporating malicious actions into its reasoning path.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial attacks that exploit incremental policy erosion. The attacker uses a breadth-first search strategy to generate multiple prompts at each turn, leveraging partial compliance from previous responses to gradually escalate the conversation towards eliciting disallowed outputs. Minor concessions accumulate, ultimately leading to complete circumvention of safety measures.