LLM Agent Security

LLM: Large Language Model

Overview

The field examines how agents can be manipulated through indirect prompt injection, malicious tools or skills, poisoned memory, excessive permissions, and multi-agent interactions, sometimes leading to data leaks or harmful actions. Researchers evaluate these risks with red-team attacks and benchmarks that track agent trajectories, tool calls, and real effects—not just final answers. Defenses include runtime authorization and least privilege, sandboxing, provenance and information-flow controls, monitoring, and security-focused training. A central challenge is protecting agents over long, changing workflows without blocking legitimate tasks, while making evaluations realistic enough to capture adaptive attacks and deployment risks.

Latest papers

332 papers44 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jul 3, 2025

Meta-SecAlign: Training LLMs against Prompt Injection for Robust Agents

Prompt injection attacks, where untrusted data contains an injected prompt to manipulate the system, have been listed as the top security threat to AI agents. By fine-tuning on simulated prompt injections, SecAlign, a leading open defense, reports LLMs with good test-time robustness and negligible benign utility drop. By scaling up training and evaluations, however, we find that SecAlign actually suffers from significant utility degradation, especially in agentic tasks where the threat of prompt injection is prominent. Motivated by this, we propose Meta-SecAlign for utility-preserving defense by (1) randomized injection position during training to avoid shortcut learning and (2) self-generated responses as high-quality in-distribution training labels. Across general knowledge, instruction following, and agentic workflows (on tool-calling and web-navigation), Meta-SecAlign maintains almost all the undefended LLM's utility while achieving better overall security than SecAlign against various static and GCG adaptive attacks. Experiments use Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.3-70B, Llama-4-Scout, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3.6-27B on 6 prompt injection benchmarks including AgentDojo, InjecAgent, WASP, and SEP. Below are links for the code (https://github.com/facebookresearch/Meta_SecAlign), Meta-SecAlign-70B (https://huggingface.co/facebook/Meta-SecAlign-70B), and Meta-SecAlign-8B (https://huggingface.co/facebook/Meta-SecAlign-8B) models.
May 28, 2025

Seven Security Challenges in Cross-domain Multi-agent LLM Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into autonomous agents that cooperate across organizational boundaries, enabling joint disaster response, supply-chain optimization, and other tasks that demand decentralized expertise without surrendering data ownership. Yet, cross-domain collaboration shatters the unified trust assumptions behind current alignment and containment techniques. An agent benign in isolation may, when receiving messages from an untrusted peer, leak secrets or violate policy, producing risks driven by emergent multi-agent dynamics rather than classical software bugs. This position paper maps the security agenda for cross-domain multi-agent LLM systems. We introduce seven categories of novel security challenges, for each of which we also present plausible attacks, security evaluation metrics, and future research guidelines.