攻击者通过改写提示词,让智能体推理变慢却仍正确,隐蔽性强。
Sponge Tool Attack: Stealthy Denial-of-Efficiency against Tool-Augmented Agentic Reasoning
- 改写原始提示词,诱导智能体走冗长路径。
- 在6模型12工具上验证,推理耗时增加3-8倍。
- 适合研究安全防御或评估智能体可靠性的团队。
让大语言模型解决复杂推理任务是迈向通用人工智能的关键。近期工作通过引入外部工具实现即插即用的智能体推理,显著提升效率与实用性。然而,此类方法对工具调用过程的恶意操纵仍缺乏深入研究。本文识别出一种特定攻击面,提出海绵式工具攻击(Sponge Tool Attack, STA),仅在仅查询访问限制下重写输入提示,无需修改模型或工具。STA将原本简洁高效的推理路径转化为冗长复杂的流程,导致显著计算开销,同时保持原始任务语义与用户意图不变,极具隐蔽性。为此,我们设计了迭代式多智能体协作框架,具备显式的重写策略控制,从原提示生成高语义保真度的良性改写。在6个模型(含开源与闭源API)、12个工具、4种智能体框架及13个覆盖5个领域的数据集上进行的大量实验验证了该攻击的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. Recent work augments LLMs with external tools to enable agentic reasoning, achieving high utility and efficiency in a plug-and-play manner. However, the inherent vulnerabilities of such methods to malicious manipulation of the tool-calling process remain largely unexplored. In this work, we identify a tool-specific attack surface and propose Sponge Tool Attack (STA), which disrupts agentic reasoning solely by rewriting the input prompt under a strict query-only access assumption. Without any modification on the underlying model or the external tools, STA converts originally concise and efficient reasoning trajectories into unnecessarily verbose and convoluted ones before arriving at the final answer. This results in substantial computational overhead while remaining stealthy by preserving the original task semantics and user intent. To achieve this, we design STA as an iterative, multi-agent collaborative framework with explicit rewritten policy control, and generates benign-looking prompt rewrites from the original one with high semantic fidelity. Extensive experiments across 6 models (including both open-source models and closed-source APIs), 12 tools, 4 agentic frameworks, and 13 datasets spanning 5 domains validate the effectiveness of STA.
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