VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
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Abstract (arXiv)
LLM agents operating in open environments face escalating risks from indirect prompt injection, particularly within the tool stream where manipulated metadata and runtime feedback hijack execution flow. Existing defenses encounter a critical dilemma as advanced models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment while static protection mechanisms sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning. To reconcile this conflict, we propose VIGIL, a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol. By facilitating speculative hypothesis generation and enforcing safety through intent-grounded verification, VIGIL preserves reasoning flexibility while ensuring robust control. We further introduce SIREN, a benchmark comprising 959 tool stream injection cases designed to simulate pervasive threats characterized by dynamic dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIGIL outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22% while more than doubling the utility under attack compared to static baselines, thereby achieving an optimal balance between security and utility.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.
Builds on
29 of 33 references.
Closest ancestors · 14
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Architecting Resilient LLM Agents: A Guide to Secure Plan-then-Execute Implementations10 Sep
- 2025MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning Attack on Real-World MCP Servers19 Aug
- 2025MCPSecBench: A Systematic Security Benchmark and Playground for Testing Model Context Protocols17 Aug
- 2025DRIFT: Dynamic Rule-Based Defense with Injection Isolation for Securing LLM Agents13 Jun
- 2025VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents3 Jun
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
- 2025Defeating Prompt Injections by Design24 Mar
- 2025Mimicking the Familiar: Dynamic Command Generation for Information Theft Attacks in LLM Tool-Learning System17 Feb
- 2025MELON: Provable Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks in AI Agents7 Feb
- 2024AdvAgent: Controllable Blackbox Red-teaming on Web Agents22 Oct
- 2024ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents9 Oct
- 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents3 Oct
2 more
Other references · 15
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2024Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlightingcited by 233
- 2025DataSentinel: A Game-Theoretic Detection of Prompt Injection Attackscited by 124
- 2024PLeak: Prompt Leaking Attacks against Large Language Model Applicationscited by 113
- 2024Attention Tracker: Detecting Prompt Injection Attacks in LLMscited by 82
- 2024Instructional Segment Embedding: Improving LLM Safety with Instruction Hierarchycited by 62
- 2025ACE: A Security Architecture for LLM-Integrated App Systemscited by 52
- 2025Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed?cited by 43
- 2025MCIP: Protecting MCP Safety via Model Contextual Integrity Protocolcited by 33
- 2024Corpus Poisoning via Approximate Greedy Gradient Descentcited by 21
- 2025CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent Systemcited by 15
- 2025MuSC: Improving Complex Instruction Following with Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Trainingcited by 12
3 more
- 2025Unsupervised Corpus Poisoning Attacks in Continuous Space for Dense Retrievalcited by 11
- 2024Applying Pre-trained Multilingual BERT in Embeddings for Improved Malicious Prompt Injection Attacks Detectioncited by 7
- 2024Data-Efficient Massive Tool Retrieval: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Query-Tool Alignment with Language Modelscited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.
13 papers.
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- 2026From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agentscited by 17
- 2026SOK: A Taxonomy of Attack Vectors and Defense Strategies for Agentic Supply Chain Runtimecited by 8
- 2026MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoningcited by 8
- 2026WARD: Adversarially Robust Defense of Web Agents Against Prompt Injectionscited by 3
- 2026Your Agentic LLMs Secretly Encode Indirect Prompt-Injection Exposure in Hidden Statescited by 3
- 2026SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systemscited by 2
- 2026VATS: Exploiting Implicit Authority in Error-Path Injection via Systematic Mutationcited by 0
- 2026Labels Are Not Endpoints: Treatment Leakage and Construct Validity in MCP Agent Security Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Do Not Restart: Residual Completion for Stateful Agent Handoffscited by 0
- 2026Beyond Single-Model Injection: A Threat Model and Defense Architecture for Prompt Injection in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
- 2026The Like Trap: Multi-Stage Poisoning against Agents in Similarity-based Recommendation Systemscited by 0
- 2026Before Acting, Change the State: Prospective State Intervention for Web Agents under Deceptive Interfacescited by 0
1 more
- 2026ActionGuard: Tool Call Authorization under Poisoned Skills30 Sep 2026
- 2026Before Acting, Change the State: Prospective State Intervention for Web Agents under Deceptive Interfaces28 Sep 2026
- 2026The Like Trap: Multi-Stage Poisoning against Agents in Similarity-based Recommendation Systems22 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Single-Model Injection: A Threat Model and Defense Architecture for Prompt Injection in Multi-Agent Systems19 Sep 2026
- 2026Do Not Restart: Residual Completion for Stateful Agent Handoffs12 Sep 2026
- 2026Labels Are Not Endpoints: Treatment Leakage and Construct Validity in MCP Agent Security Evaluation13 Aug 2026
- 2026Your Agentic LLMs Secretly Encode Indirect Prompt-Injection Exposure in Hidden States1 Aug 2026
- 2026VATS: Exploiting Implicit Authority in Error-Path Injection via Systematic Mutation6 Jun 2026
- 2026MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoning24 May 2026
- 2026WARD: Adversarially Robust Defense of Web Agents Against Prompt Injections14 May 2026
- 2026SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systems27 Apr 2026
- 2026From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agents16 Mar 2026
- 2026From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agentscited by 17
- 2026SOK: A Taxonomy of Attack Vectors and Defense Strategies for Agentic Supply Chain Runtimecited by 8
- 2026MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoningcited by 8
- 2026WARD: Adversarially Robust Defense of Web Agents Against Prompt Injectionscited by 3
- 2026Your Agentic LLMs Secretly Encode Indirect Prompt-Injection Exposure in Hidden Statescited by 3
- 2026SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systemscited by 2
- 2026VATS: Exploiting Implicit Authority in Error-Path Injection via Systematic Mutationcited by 0
- 2026Beyond Single-Model Injection: A Threat Model and Defense Architecture for Prompt Injection in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
- 2026The Like Trap: Multi-Stage Poisoning against Agents in Similarity-based Recommendation Systemscited by 0
- 2026Before Acting, Change the State: Prospective State Intervention for Web Agents under Deceptive Interfacescited by 0
- 2026ActionGuard: Tool Call Authorization under Poisoned Skillscited by 0
- 2026ActionGuard: Tool Call Authorization under Poisoned Skills30 Sep 2026
- 2026Before Acting, Change the State: Prospective State Intervention for Web Agents under Deceptive Interfaces28 Sep 2026
- 2026The Like Trap: Multi-Stage Poisoning against Agents in Similarity-based Recommendation Systems22 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Single-Model Injection: A Threat Model and Defense Architecture for Prompt Injection in Multi-Agent Systems19 Sep 2026
- 2026Your Agentic LLMs Secretly Encode Indirect Prompt-Injection Exposure in Hidden States1 Aug 2026
- 2026VATS: Exploiting Implicit Authority in Error-Path Injection via Systematic Mutation6 Jun 2026
- 2026MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoning24 May 2026
- 2026WARD: Adversarially Robust Defense of Web Agents Against Prompt Injections14 May 2026
- 2026SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systems27 Apr 2026
- 2026From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agents16 Mar 2026
- 2026SOK: A Taxonomy of Attack Vectors and Defense Strategies for Agentic Supply Chain Runtime23 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026PACE: Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement for Tool-Using LLM Agents
- 2025SIEVE: Selective Integrity Verification and Escalation for Defending LLM Agents against Indirect Prompt Injection
- 2026ChainFuzzer: Greybox Fuzzing for Workflow-Level Multi-Tool Vulnerabilities in LLM Agents
- 2026AgentVisor: Defending LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection via Semantic Virtualization
- 2026CaMeLoT: CaMeL orchestrated with Temporal logic for static verification and liveness
- 2026Injection-Execution Dissociation: A Mechanistic Evaluation of Persistent Memory Attacks and Defenses in Stateful LLM Agents
- 2026Securing LLM Agents Need Intent-to-Execution Integrity
- 2026Adaptive Evaluation of Out-of-Band Defenses Against Prompt Injection in LLM Agents