arXiv:2604.03870cs.CL2026-04被引 4

发现智能体系统存在隐蔽攻击漏洞,提出有效防御新方法。

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

  • 在动态多步工具调用环境中测试六种防御策略
  • 多数防御被复杂注入攻击绕过,部分反而引发副作用
  • 利用表示工程提前拦截恶意行为,跨模型效果稳定

开源框架的快速部署推动了多智能体系统的兴起,但其扩展的动作空间带来了严重的安全挑战。间接提示注入(IPI)通过第三方内容隐藏恶意指令,在正常操作中可触发数据外泄等未经授权行为。现有评估多基于孤立单轮基准,难以揭示复杂动态环境下的系统性漏洞。为此,我们在九个LLM主干模型上,针对四种复杂IPI攻击向量,系统评估了六种防御策略。实验完全在动态多步工具调用环境中进行,以捕捉真实攻击面。分析显示,先进注入几乎能绕过所有基线防御,部分表面缓解措施甚至产生反效果。尽管恶意指令执行极快,但智能体内部状态表现出异常高的决策熵。受此启发,我们探索表示工程(RepE)作为检测手段:通过提取工具输入位置的隐藏状态,成功在动作执行前识别并拦截非法操作,跨多种LLM主干实现高精度检测。本研究揭示了当前IPI防御的局限性,并提供了一种构建抗脆弱多智能体架构的实用范式。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The rapid deployment of open-source frameworks has significantly advanced the development of modern multi-agent systems. However, expanded action spaces, including uncontrolled privilege exposure and hidden inter-system interactions, pose severe security challenges. Specifically, Indirect Prompt Injections (IPI), which conceal malicious instructions within third-party content, can trigger unauthorized actions such as data exfiltration during normal operations. While current security evaluations predominantly rely on isolated single-turn benchmarks, the systemic vulnerabilities of these agents within complex dynamic environments remain critically underexplored. To bridge this gap, we systematically evaluate six defense strategies against four sophisticated IPI attack vectors across nine LLM backbones. Crucially, we conduct our evaluation entirely within dynamic multi-step tool-calling environments to capture the true attack surface of modern autonomous agents. Moving beyond binary success rates, our multidimensional analysis reveals a pronounced fragility. Advanced injections successfully bypass nearly all baseline defenses, and some surface-level mitigations even produce counterproductive side effects. Furthermore, while agents execute malicious instructions almost instantaneously, their internal states exhibit abnormally high decision entropy. Motivated by this latent hesitation, we investigate Representation Engineering (RepE) as a robust detection strategy. By extracting hidden states at the tool-input position, we revealed that the RepE-based circuit breaker successfully identifies and intercepts unauthorized actions before the agent commits to them, achieving high detection accuracy across diverse LLM backbones. This study exposes the limitations of current IPI defenses and provides a highly practical paradigm for building resilient multi-agent architectures.

智能体安全提示注入表示工程防御机制

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