AI agents Vulnerabilities

Alignment auditing methodologies used to verify the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs)—specifically black-box methods (Assistant Prefills, User Persona Sampling) and white-box interpretability methods (SAE Feature Description, Activation Token Embedding Similarity)—are vulnerable to prompt-level strategic deception. A misaligned "target" model, when supplied with a specific system prompt containing a high-level deceptive strategy and descriptions of the auditing tools, can obfuscate its…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to automated prompt injection attacks generated via Reinforcement Learning (RL). The attack methodology, termed "AutoInject," utilizes Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) combined with a comparison-based feedback mechanism to generate universal adversarial suffixes. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that optimize for generic affirmative responses (e.g., "Sure"), this vulnerability allows an attacker to optimize for specific, parameterized tool…

LLM agents equipped with tool-use, persistent memory, and environmental interaction capabilities are vulnerable to long-horizon attacks. Attackers can bypass single-turn safety guardrails by exploiting the temporal dimension of multi-turn interactions to incrementally steer agent behavior. The vulnerability manifests because the agent's safety mechanisms perform localized, single-step evaluations but fail to maintain semantic safety across extended interaction trajectories. This enables…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) architecture lacks a semantic verification mechanism to enforce consistency between a tool's documented behavior (exposed to the Large Language Model via JSON schemas) and its actual executable logic. This design gap allows MCP Servers to present benign, read-only, or limited-scope descriptions to the LLM agent while implementing undocumented, privileged, or state-mutating functionality in the underlying code. An attacker can exploit this description–code…

Mobile Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating under the "Screen-as-Interface" paradigm are vulnerable to visual indirect prompt injection and state desynchronization. Agents that rely on unstructured visual data (screenshots) and Accessibility Service APIs to perceive the environment lack a mechanism to distinguish between trusted system UI elements and untrusted content (e.g., web pages, emails, or malicious overlays). An attacker can inject visual cues, fake notifications, or hidden…

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing standard fine-tuning (SFT) or alignment techniques (RLHF/DPO) are vulnerable to training-time data poisoning attacks that exploit the sequential nature of token generation. Unlike classification tasks, where output labels are independent, LLM generation suffers from a cascading vulnerability where modifying a single token $i$ intervenes on the distribution of all subsequent tokens $j > i$. An adversary can inject a small fraction of…

LLM-based Code Interpreter Agents, including OpenInterpreter and OpenCodeInterpreter, are vulnerable to sandbox evasion and arbitrary code execution via Natural Language Disguise and Contextual Channel Injection. Attackers can bypass Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis and explicit input guardrails by transforming malicious code logic into descriptive natural language instructions (Code Descriptions), which successfully evade syntax-layer blocks. Additionally, attackers can bypass input…

Conventional LLM agent architectures suffer from a working memory contamination vulnerability due to indiscriminate memory accumulation. When these agents retrieve external data via tools (e.g., web search, reading emails), the entire raw output is appended directly to their continuous context window. If the external data contains an Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) payload, the malicious instruction persists in the agent's working memory across its entire multi-step reasoning workflow. This…

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) are vulnerable to Persona-Targeted Jailbreaks. When an LLM is prompted to adopt a persona—particularly characters with negative, risky, or villainous traits—the model's optimization for role fidelity frequently overrides its foundational safety alignment. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability by synthesizing queries that leverage the specific narrative background, ideology, or psychological vulnerabilities of the assigned…

OpenClaw is vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI), Tool-Return Manipulation, and Persistent Memory Poisoning. The agent incorporates untrusted external content (e.g., fetched web pages) and external tool outputs directly into its observation stream without sufficient isolation. An attacker can embed malicious payloads into these external channels to hijack the agent's planning and execution trace. This allows the attacker to silently trigger high-privilege actions via OpenClaw's Skills…