The paper reports a reproducible black-box evaluation showing that adversarial user queries can cause deployed LLM applications to reveal hidden system prompts. In the authors’ measurement of 1,200 applications across six commercial platforms, 1,064 applications leaked prompt content (81.0%–93.5% per anonymized platform). This is a paper-reported result, not independently verified here. LeakBench and the official artifact repository provide defensive benchmark materials for controlled testing…
Understanding and Mitigating Prompt Leaking Attacks in Real-World LLM-Based Applications
Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to system instruction leakage when extraction requests are framed as benign formatting, encoding, or structured-output tasks. While standard alignment and refusal mechanisms successfully block direct queries for system instructions, they fail when attackers request the instructions to be rendered in alternate representations (e.g., YAML, TOML, Base64, or system logs). The model's safety filters misinterpret the request as a harmless transformation or…
Automated Framework to Evaluate and Harden LLM System Instructions against Encoding Attacks
Evaluated models: GPT-4.1 Mini, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Gemini 2.5 Flash+1 more
OpenClaw is vulnerable to persistent memory poisoning, allowing an attacker to manipulate the agent's long-term memory store (MEMORY.md) via prompt injection. Because the autonomous agent continuously integrates this memory file as context for all subsequent reasoning and task planning, injected payloads act as durable behavioral constraints. This allows an attacker to persistently alter the agent's core policy, manipulate tool selection, and hijack future sessions without any further…
Taming openclaw: Security analysis and mitigation of autonomous llm agent threats
Agentic LLM systems that automatically preview URLs or extract web metadata are vulnerable to implicit prompt injection, resulting in silent data exfiltration ("silent egress"). Attackers can embed adversarial instructions in unobserved web elements, such as HTML <title> tags, <meta> descriptions, or Open Graph metadata. When a user requests a summary of the URL—or when the agent automatically unfurls a linked URL in a chat—the system fetches the malicious page and flattens this metadata into…
Silent Egress: When Implicit Prompt Injection Makes LLM Agents Leak Without a Trace
An Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) vulnerability exists in reasoning-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) when processing untrusted external documents, such as resumes in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Unlike standard instruction-tuned models that resort to easily detectable factual hallucinations when injected, reasoning models utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) architectures weaponize their inference capabilities to construct highly persuasive, unfaithful post-hoc rationalizations. They…
Trojan Horses in Recruiting: A Red-Teaming Case Study on Indirect Prompt Injection in Standard vs. Reasoning Models
A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) deployments and multi-agent systems where an autonomous attacker agent can systematically extract hidden system prompts through self-evolving interaction strategies. The vulnerability leverages a "JustAsk" framework which utilizes Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) exploration to dynamically select and refine attack vectors from a hierarchical taxonomy of 14 atomic skills (e.g., structural formatting, authority appeals) and 14 multi-turn…
Just Ask: Curious Code Agents Reveal System Prompts in Frontier LLMs
Evaluated models: o1, Llama 3.1 70B Hanami X1, Phi-4+38 more
A vulnerability exists in OpenAI's Custom GPTs platform where the lack of effective isolation between the system context ("Expert Prompt"), external knowledge retrieval, and user input allows for unauthorized information disclosure and tool misuse. By employing specific prompt injection techniques—including Hex injection, Many-shot prefix attacks, and Knowledge Poisoning (uploading malicious files)—an attacker can bypass safety guardrails. This results in the extraction of proprietary system…
An Empirical Study on the Security Vulnerabilities of GPTs
A black-box guardrail reverse-engineering vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) serving systems that employ output filtering mechanisms. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to replicate the proprietary decision-making policy and rule sets of the target's safety guardrail without direct access to model parameters. This is achieved through a technique termed Guardrail Reverse-engineering Attack (GRA), which utilizes a reinforcement learning framework combined with genetic…
Multiple open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs)—specifically those prioritizing capability over safety alignment—exhibit a critical vulnerability to adaptive multi-turn prompt injection and jailbreak attacks. While these models effectively reject isolated, single-turn adversarial inputs (averaging ~13.11% Attack Success Rate), they fail to maintain safety guardrails and policy enforcement across extended conversational contexts. By leveraging iterative strategies such as "Crescendo" (gradual…
Death by a Thousand Prompts: Open Model Vulnerability Analysis
Evaluated models: GPT-oss 20B, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, Mistral Large 2+5 more