AgentXploit: Autonomous Repository-to-Runtime Red-Teaming for AI Agents
cs.CR, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-09-25
Updated: 2026-09-25
Comments: 20 pages, 2 figures
Code: https://github.com/lwd17/AgentXploit
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: AI agents combine language models with external data and tools that can modify files, call APIs, or execute code.
Terminology
Abstract
AI agents combine language models with external data and tools that can modify files, call APIs, or execute code. Security failures can arise when adversarial content changes an agent's tool use or when the surrounding software contains vulnerabilities such as path traversal or command injection. We study authorized white-box pre-deployment auditing, where the auditor has access to the target repository and a controlled runtime, but successful attacks must still act through the task-defined attacker interface and be confirmed by an external verifier. We present AgentXploit, a two-role auditing system that separates repository-level attack-path discovery from runtime exploitation. The Analyzer Agent traces attacker-controlled inputs to sensitive operations and records code-supported candidate attack paths; the Exploiter Agent turns these paths into concrete attacks and revises them using runtime feedback. We also introduce AgentXploit-Bench, containing 72 reproducible vulnerabilities across 12 open-source AI-agent systems and frameworks. Across three runs, AgentXploit reaches 59.3% end-to-end success, compared with 38.4% for Codex. Under a token-budget-matched comparison, Codex reaches 46.3%. On AgentDojo, where injection points are provided, the Exploiter Agent reaches 79.2% attack success versus 52.7% for AgentVigil. These results highlight repository discovery and runtime exploitation as distinct challenges in end-to-end agent security auditing.
Sources
- StruQ: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Structured Queries
- SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimization
- AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases
- DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
- WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks
- A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis
- The Emerged Security and Privacy of LLM Agent: A Survey with Case Studies
- Co-RedTeam: Orchestrated Security Discovery and Exploitation with LLM Agents
- Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting
- Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations
- Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security
- EIA: Environmental Injection Attack on Generalist Web Agents for Privacy Leakage
- DataSentinel: A Game-Theoretic Detection of Prompt Injection Attacks
- WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback
- Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs
- Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models
- ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs
- Progent: Securing AI Agents with Privilege Control
- PromptArmor: Simple yet Effective Prompt Injection Defenses
- The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions
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