ToFu: Exploiting and Fuzzing the LLM-Orchestrator-Tool Trust Boundary
cs.CR
Submitted: 2026-10-09
Updated: 2026-10-09
Comments: 33 pages, 4 figures, 16 tables. Evaluates 273 open-source MCP servers (3405 tools); 253 verified semantic security bugs in 118 servers. Appendices include a case study, a Repeat-After-Me transcript on LangGraph, the full sanitizer corpus, the list of evaluated repositories, and the verbatim LLM prompts
Code: https://github.com/Agent-Threat-Rule/agent-threat-rules
Project page: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/stable/user-guide/core-user-guide
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external software through tools, with an orchestration layer translating model outputs into structured tool
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external software through tools, with an orchestration layer translating model outputs into structured tool invocations. This architecture creates an LLM-orchestrator-tool trust boundary where tool semantics may go unenforced and LLM-generated arguments may be incorrectly treated as trusted. We present ToFu, a tool-aware framework that automatically derives semantic security checks for LLM tools from their existing metadata and a CWE-guided sanitizer corpus. ToFu specializes these checks to individual tools and automatically generates fuzzing harnesses and semantic oracles using runtime introspection and outcome sanitization. We evaluated ToFu across 273 MCP servers containing 3405 tools and identified verified bugs corresponding to CWE weakness classes in 343 tools across 118 of the servers. Our findings show that real-world tools frequently fail to enforce their documented input semantics, making it unsafe to treat LLM-generated arguments as trusted.
Sources
- FlowGuard: From Signals to Evidence for MCP Security Detection
- Rethinking MCP Security: A Large-Scale Study of Runtime MCP Servers and Security Scanner Reliability
- ACLE-MCP: Attested Capability Leases for Execution-Time Trust in Remote LLM Tool Use
- Hybrid Analysis for Secure MCP Tool Use in LLM Agents
- Don't believe everything you read: Understanding and Measuring MCP Behavior under Misleading Tool Descriptions
- Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysis
- ToolFuzz -- Automated Agent Tool Testing
- Exposed by Design: A Dynamic Security Assessment of Internet-Facing MCP Servers at Scale
- TrustShiftProbe: Characterizing, Benchmarking, and Defending Staged Trust Attacks on MCP Servers
- PromptArmor: Simple yet Effective Prompt Injection Defenses
- Mitigating Taint-Style Vulnerabilities in MCP Servers via Security-Aware Tool Descriptions
- Description-Code Inconsistency in Real-world MCP Servers: Measurement, Detection, and Security Implications
- Beyond the Protocol: Unveiling Attack Vectors in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Ecosystem
- VIPER-MCP: Detecting and Exploiting Taint-Style Vulnerabilities in Model Context Protocol Servers
- The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions
- MCPSecBench: A Systematic Security Benchmark and Playground for Testing Model Context Protocols
- MiniScope: Authorizing Agents with Least-Privilege Permissions
- Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models
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