Attack Surface

Application layer Research

Security research involving application interfaces and API implementations

273 matching entries

Application layer research results

273 entries

Sleeper Memory Poisoning in LLM Agents

Published May 14, 2026Analyzed Jul 20, 2026Source: arXiv

The paper presents a specific black-box indirect prompt-injection evaluation: attacker-controlled external content can cause a memory-enabled assistant or external memory manager to persist a fabricated user memory, which may later be retrieved in a separate session and steer responses or agent actions. The authors evaluate injection, retrieval, and conditional adversarial usage separately across synthetic document and future-session datasets. The released repository provides defensive…

Hidden in Memory: Sleeper Memory Poisoning in LLM Agents

Evaluated models: GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6+3 more

GPT-5.4
GPT-5.5
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Kimi-K2.6
DeepSeek V4-Pro

Query-Agnostic Poisoning of Medical Multimodal RAG

Published May 11, 2026Analyzed Jul 20, 2026Source: arXiv

M3Att demonstrates a reproducible knowledge-poisoning issue in medical multimodal RAG: an attacker with limited corpus-distribution knowledge can insert paired image-text entries whose visually perturbed images are broadly retrieved and whose clinically plausible misinformation steers downstream generation. The paper evaluates both white-box and black-box retrieval optimization and reports degraded diagnostic and report-generation utility across multiple datasets, retrievers, and LVLMs. These…

Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Evaluated models: GPT-4o, GPT-5 Chat, Gemini 2.5 Flash+5 more

GPT-4o
GPT-5 Chat
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Claude Haiku 4.5
LLaVA Med
CLIP ViT-Large-Patch14-336
BGE-VL-base
SigLIP-SO400M-Patch14-384

Single-Document Reasoning Poisoning in RAG

Published Apr 14, 2026Analyzed Jul 20, 2026Source: arXiv

The paper describes a specific black-box knowledge-base poisoning attack against retrieval-augmented reasoning systems. An attacker who can add one query-specific document to the corpus can cause it to be retrieved and influence the LLM toward an attacker-chosen answer. AdversarialCoT shapes the document around the target model’s observable reasoning structure and iteratively refines retrieval relevance and persuasive reasoning using final model feedback. The paper reports this as an…

AdversarialCoT: Single-Document Retrieval Poisoning for LLM Reasoning

Evaluated models: DeepSeek R1, GLM 4.5, Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct+1 more

DeepSeek R1
GLM 4.5
Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B

No-Prompt Reasoning Hijack

Published Apr 7, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

An implicit reasoning hijacking vulnerability exists in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLM-based agent frameworks. Attackers with write access to an agent's external memory or knowledge base can inject adversarially optimized malicious instances that trigger jailbreaks without requiring any modifications to the user's input prompt. The attack utilizes a shadow model to extract high-contribution subword tokens from anticipated benign user queries via log-probability changes and…

Stop Fixating on Prompts: Reasoning Hijacking and Constraint Tightening for Red-Teaming LLM Agents

Evaluated models: GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT-5+4 more

GPT-3.5 Turbo
GPT-4o
GPT-5
Llama 3.1 70B
Claude 3.5 Haiku
Gemini 3.0 Pro
ERNIE 3.5

Indirect Agent Privilege Exposure

Published Apr 4, 2026Analyzed Apr 11, 2026Source: arXiv

Autonomous LLM agents deployed in dynamic, multi-step tool-calling environments are highly vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injections (IPI) embedded in external content. Surface-level defensive prompts and monitoring mechanisms (such as Prompt Warning, the Sandwich Method, Spotlighting, Keyword Filtering, and LLM-as-a-Judge) consistently fail to prevent exploitation and occasionally exacerbate the vulnerability by introducing adversarial distraction. While compromised agents exhibit…

Your Agent is More Brittle Than You Think: Uncovering Indirect Injection Vulnerabilities in Agentic LLMs

Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 14B, Qwen 2.5 32B, Qwen 3 4B+6 more

Qwen 2.5 14B
Qwen 2.5 32B
Qwen 3 4B
Qwen 3 8B
Qwen 3 14B
Llama 3 8B
GLM 4 9B
Gemma 3 12B
Mistral 7B

Agent Implicit Doc Execution

Published Apr 3, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

LLM-based coding agents are vulnerable to Document-Driven Implicit Payload Execution (DDIPE) via supply-chain poisoning of third-party agent skills. Attackers can embed malicious logic directly into legitimate-looking code examples and configuration templates within skill documentation files (e.g., SKILL.md). Because coding agents ingest this metadata into their context windows and treat the documentation as an authoritative reference, the underlying LLM silently reproduces and executes the…

Supply-Chain Poisoning Attacks Against LLM Coding Agent Skill Ecosystems

Evaluated models: Claude Sonnet 4.6, GLM-4.7, MiniMax M2.5+2 more

Claude Sonnet 4.6
GLM-4.7
MiniMax M2.5
GPT-5.4
Gemini 2.5 Pro

Observation Poisons Agent Memory

Published Apr 3, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

Memory-augmented LLM web agents utilizing raw trajectory memory are vulnerable to Environment-injected Trajectory-based Agent Memory Poisoning (eTAMP). Attackers can embed malicious instructions within user-generated web content (e.g., product pages, forum posts). When the agent processes this content during a routine task, the instructions are passively ingested into its raw trajectory memory. During subsequent, entirely separate tasks on different websites, semantic retrieval mechanisms pull…

Poison Once, Exploit Forever: Environment-Injected Memory Poisoning Attacks on Web Agents

Evaluated models: GPT-5 Mini, GPT-5.2, GPT-oss 120B+3 more

GPT-5 Mini
GPT-5.2
GPT-oss 120B
Qwen 2.5 VL 72B
Qwen3-VL-32B
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

Agent Skill Injection

Published Apr 1, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

LLM-based personal agents are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) defense bypasses via declarative context reframing and implicit file provenance trust. Attackers can bypass agent safety filters by phrasing malicious instructions as declarative compliance alerts rather than imperative commands. Because agents are designed to report discrepancies as expected behavior, declarative framing bypasses intent-sensitive safety mechanisms. Additionally, attackers can exploit the agent's…

ClawSafety: Safe LLMs, Unsafe Agents

Evaluated models: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek V3+2 more

Claude Sonnet 4.6
Gemini 2.5 Pro
DeepSeek V3
Kimi K2.5
GPT-5.1

Benign Cross-User Contamination

Published Apr 1, 2026Analyzed Apr 11, 2026Source: arXiv

A vulnerability exists in multi-user LLM agents utilizing persistent shared state, allowing Unintentional Cross-User Contamination (UCC). Without requiring any malicious input or attacker, benign user interactions containing locally valid scope constraints, formatting preferences, or procedural rules are persisted into the agent's shared memory or conversational context. The agent subsequently retrieves and misapplies these scope-bound artifacts to unrelated tasks from different users. This…

No Attacker Needed: Unintentional Cross-User Contamination in Shared-State LLM Agents

Evaluated models: GPT-4o

LLM Judge Manipulation

Published Mar 31, 2026Analyzed Apr 10, 2026Source: arXiv

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

Security in LLM-as-a-Judge: A Comprehensive SoK

Evaluated models: GPT-4o, o1, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct+1 more

GPT-4o
o1
Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct
Llama 3 70B Instruct

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