mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ACRFence: Preventing Semantic Rollback Attacks in Agent Checkpoint-Restore

arXiv 2603.20625 ↗First posted 21 Mar 2026cs.CRcited by 9

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

LLM agent frameworks increasingly offer checkpoint-restore for error recovery and exploration, advising developers to make external tool calls safe to retry. This advice assumes that a retried call will be identical to the original, an assumption that holds for traditional programs but fails for LLM agents, which re-synthesize subtly different requests after restore. Servers treat these re-generated requests as new, enabling duplicate payments, unauthorized reuse of consumed credentials, and other irreversible side effects; we term these semantic rollback attacks. We identify two attack classes, Action Replay and Authority Resurrection, validate them in a proof of concept experiment, and confirm that the problem has been independently acknowledged by framework maintainers. We propose ACRFence, a framework-agnostic mitigation that records irreversible tool effects and enforces replay-or-fork semantics upon restoration

Key facts. Cited by 9 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 10 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2026.

Builds on

10 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025AgentSight: System-Level Observability for AI Agents Using eBPF2 Aug
  2. 2025Progent: Securing AI Agents with Privilege Control16 Apr
  3. 2025AgentSpec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement for Safe and Reliable LLM Agents24 Mar
  4. 2025Commercial LLM Agents Are Already Vulnerable to Simple Yet Dangerous Attacks12 Feb

Other references · 6

  1. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agentscited by 956
  2. 2024Non-Determinism of "Deterministic" LLM Settingscited by 84
  3. 2025Get Experience from Practice: LLM Agents with Record & Replaycited by 22
  4. 2026Replayable Financial Agents: A Determinism-Faithfulness Assurance Harness for Tool-Using LLM Agentscited by 7
  5. 2026Fork, Explore, Commit: OS Primitives for Agentic Explorationcited by 5
  6. 2026Beyond Reproducibility: Token Probabilities Expose Large Language Model Nondeterminismcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Beyond Single-Use Tokens: Durable Authorization State for Replay-Resistant LLM Agent Actions
  2. 2026DART: Semantic Recoverability for Structured Tool Agents
  3. 2026Crab: A Semantics-Aware Checkpoint/Restore Runtime for Agent Sandboxes
  4. 2026From Approval to Execution: Reconstruction-Aware Repair Analysis for LLM-Agent Software
  5. 2026Cordon: Semantic Transactions for Tool-Using LLM Agents
  6. 2026From Faulty Memories to Corrected Actions: Dependency-Guided Rollback Repair for Memory-Augmented Agents
  7. 2026Aborted but Not Forgotten: KV-Cache Retention Breaks Rollback Consistency in Language Agents
  8. 2026Context-Fractured Decomposition Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents: Exploiting Artifact Provenance Gaps