From Secure Agentic AI to Secure Agentic Web: Challenges, Threats, and Future Directions
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agentic systems that plan, memorize, and act in open-world environments. This shift brings new security problems: failures are no longer only unsafe text generation, but can become real harm through tool use, persistent memory, and interaction with untrusted web content. In this survey, we provide a transition-oriented view from Secure Agentic AI to a Secure Agentic Web. We first summarize a component-aligned threat taxonomy covering prompt abuse, environment injection, memory attacks, toolchain abuse, model tampering, and agent network attacks. We then review defense strategies, including prompt hardening, safety-aware decoding, privilege control for tools and APIs, runtime monitoring, continuous red-teaming, and protocol-level security mechanisms. We further discuss how these threats and mitigations escalate in the Agentic Web, where delegation chains, cross-domain interactions, and protocol-mediated ecosystems amplify risks via propagation and composition. Finally, we highlight open challenges for web-scale deployment, such as interoperable identity and authorization, provenance and traceability, ecosystem-level response, and scalable evaluation under adaptive adversaries. Our goal is to connect recent empirical findings with system-level requirements, and to outline practical research directions toward trustworthy agent ecosystems.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 48 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.
Builds on
48 of 51 references.
Closest ancestors · 27
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Security Risks of Agentic Vehicles: A Systematic Analysis of Cognitive and Cross-Layer Threats18 Dec
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- 2025AgentSentinel: An End-to-End and Real-Time Security Defense Framework for Computer-Use Agents9 Sep
- 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety8 Jul
- 2025We Should Identify and Mitigate Third-Party Safety Risks in MCP-Powered Agent Systems16 Jun
- 2025WebInject: Prompt Injection Attack to Web Agents16 May
- 2025AgentVigil: Generic Black-Box Red-teaming for Indirect Prompt Injection against LLM Agents9 May
- 2025Manipulating Multimodal Agents via Cross-Modal Prompt Injection19 Apr
- 2025MCP Guardian: A Security-First Layer for Safeguarding MCP-Based AI System17 Apr
- 2025Progent: Securing AI Agents with Privilege Control16 Apr
- 2025A Survey on Trustworthy LLM Agents: Threats and Countermeasures12 Mar
15 more
- 2025Red-Teaming LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Communication Attacks20 Feb
- 2025Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memory17 Feb
- 2025AgentGuard: Repurposing Agentic Orchestrator for Safety Evaluation of Tool Orchestration13 Feb
- 2024LeakAgent: RL-based Red-teaming Agent for LLM Privacy Leakage7 Dec
- 2024Attacking Vision-Language Computer Agents via Pop-ups4 Nov
- 2024NetSafe: Exploring the Topological Safety of Multi-agent Networks21 Oct
- 2024Imprompter: Tricking LLM Agents into Improper Tool Use19 Oct
- 2024Prompt Infection: LLM-to-LLM Prompt Injection within Multi-Agent Systems9 Oct
- 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents3 Oct
- 2024EIA: Environmental Injection Attack on Generalist Web Agents for Privacy Leakage17 Sep
- 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
- 2024Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents18 Jun
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
- 2024Watch Out for Your Agents! Investigating Backdoor Threats to LLM-Based Agents17 Feb
- 2024Agent Smith: A Single Image Can Jailbreak One Million Multimodal LLM Agents Exponentially Fast13 Feb
Other references · 21
- 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,417
- 2022Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Modelscited by 817
- 2023AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Modelscited by 777
- 2024StruQ: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Structured Queriescited by 366
- 2023Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defensescited by 362
- 2025Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directionscited by 263
- 2024SafeDecoding: Defending against Jailbreak Attacks via Safety-Aware Decodingcited by 245
- 2023MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teamingcited by 163
- 2024Robust Prompt Optimization for Defending Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attackscited by 156
- 2025Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systemscited by 128
- 2024AI Agents Under Threat: A Survey of Key Security Challenges and Future Pathwayscited by 127
- 2025Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systemscited by 125
9 more
- 2025Open Challenges in Multi-Agent Security: Towards Secure Systems of Interacting AI Agentscited by 67
- 2024SG-Bench: Evaluating LLM Safety Generalization Across Diverse Tasks and Prompt Typescited by 59
- 2024MultiAgent Collaboration Attack: Investigating Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Model Collaborations via Debatecited by 56
- 2023AART: AI-Assisted Red-Teaming with Diverse Data Generation for New LLM-powered Applicationscited by 53
- 2025Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agentscited by 43
- 2025Enterprise-Grade Security for the Model Context Protocol (MCP): Frameworks and Mitigation Strategiescited by 42
- 2025Multi-Agent Security Tax: Trading Off Security and Collaboration Capabilities in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 27
- 2024SleeperNets: Universal Backdoor Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 19
- 2025Position: AI Safety Must Embrace an Antifragile Perspectivecited by 5
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