Your Agent Is Mine: Measuring Malicious Intermediary Attacks on the LLM Supply Chain
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on third-party API routers to dispatch tool-calling requests across multiple upstream providers. These routers operate as application-layer proxies with full plaintext access to every in-flight JSON payload, yet no provider enforces cryptographic integrity between client and upstream model. We present the first systematic study of this attack surface. We formalize a threat model for malicious LLM API routers and define two core attack classes, payload injection (AC-1) and secret exfiltration (AC-2), together with two adaptive evasion variants: dependency-targeted injection (AC-1.a) and conditional delivery (AC-1.b). Across 28 paid routers purchased from Taobao, Xianyu, and Shopify-hosted storefronts and 400 free routers collected from public communities, we find 1 paid and 8 free routers actively injecting malicious code, 2 deploying adaptive evasion triggers, 17 touching researcher-owned AWS canary credentials, and 1 draining ETH from a researcher-owned private key. Two poisoning studies further show that ostensibly benign routers can be pulled into the same attack surface: a leaked OpenAI key generates 100M GPT-5.4 tokens and more than seven Codex sessions, while weakly configured decoys yield 2B billed tokens, 99 credentials across 440 Codex sessions, and 401 sessions already running in autonomous YOLO mode. We build Mine, a research proxy that implements all four attack classes against four public agent frameworks, and use it to evaluate three deployable client-side defenses: a fail-closed policy gate, response-side anomaly screening, and append-only transparency logging.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 8 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.
Builds on
8 of 45 references.
Closest ancestors · 1
Same direction, newest first
Other references · 7
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
- 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
- 2020Weight Poisoning Attacks on Pre-trained Modelscited by 341
- 2020Backstabber's Knife Collection: A Review of Open Source Software Supply Chain Attackscited by 61
- 2022Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chainscited by 58
- 2018The Sorry State of TLS Security in Enterprise Interception Appliancescited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.
13 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 7
- 2026KBF: Knowledge Boundary as Fingerprint for Language Model and Black-Box API Auditingcited by 3
- 2026Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defensecited by 2
- 2026The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEscited by 1
- 2026Necessary but Not Sufficient: Temperature Control and Reproducibility in LLM-as-Judge Safety Evaluationscited by 1
- 2026Rewriting the Response Path: Silent Tampering and Provider-Signed Defense in BYOK LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026CoT-Guard: Small Models for Strong Monitoringcited by 0
- 2026Provably Secure Agent Guardrailcited by 0
- 2026Where Is the Tradeoff in Using Third-Party API Routers for Agentic Software Development?cited by 0
- 2026Position: AI Lock-In Is in Progress, and We Must Be Preparedcited by 0
- 2026When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Callingcited by 0
- 2026When the Agent Becomes the Kernel: A Systematization of Security on the Path to AI-Native Operating Systemscited by 0
1 more
- 2026SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agents27 Sep 2026
- 2026When the Agent Becomes the Kernel: A Systematization of Security on the Path to AI-Native Operating Systems20 Sep 2026
- 2026When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling18 Aug 2026
- 2026Where Is the Tradeoff in Using Third-Party API Routers for Agentic Software Development?26 Jul 2026
- 2026Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defense23 Jul 2026
- 2026Necessary but Not Sufficient: Temperature Control and Reproducibility in LLM-as-Judge Safety Evaluations24 Jun 2026
- 2026The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs15 Jun 2026
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation9 Jun 2026
- 2026Position: AI Lock-In Is in Progress, and We Must Be Prepared28 May 2026
- 2026KBF: Knowledge Boundary as Fingerprint for Language Model and Black-Box API Auditing28 May 2026
- 2026Provably Secure Agent Guardrail28 May 2026
- 2026CoT-Guard: Small Models for Strong Monitoring12 May 2026
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 7
- 2026Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defensecited by 2
- 2026Rewriting the Response Path: Silent Tampering and Provider-Signed Defense in BYOK LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Provably Secure Agent Guardrailcited by 0
- 2026Where Is the Tradeoff in Using Third-Party API Routers for Agentic Software Development?cited by 0
- 2026When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Callingcited by 0
- 2026When the Agent Becomes the Kernel: A Systematization of Security on the Path to AI-Native Operating Systemscited by 0
- 2026SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agents27 Sep 2026
- 2026When the Agent Becomes the Kernel: A Systematization of Security on the Path to AI-Native Operating Systems20 Sep 2026
- 2026When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling18 Aug 2026
- 2026Where Is the Tradeoff in Using Third-Party API Routers for Agentic Software Development?26 Jul 2026
- 2026Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defense23 Jul 2026
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation9 Jun 2026
- 2026Provably Secure Agent Guardrail28 May 2026
- 2026Rewriting the Response Path: Silent Tampering and Provider-Signed Defense in BYOK LLM Agents4 May 2026
- 2026CoT-Guard: Small Models for Strong Monitoringcited by 0
- 2026CoT-Guard: Small Models for Strong Monitoring12 May 2026
- 2026KBF: Knowledge Boundary as Fingerprint for Language Model and Black-Box API Auditingcited by 3
- 2026The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEscited by 1
- 2026Necessary but Not Sufficient: Temperature Control and Reproducibility in LLM-as-Judge Safety Evaluationscited by 1
- 2026Position: AI Lock-In Is in Progress, and We Must Be Preparedcited by 0
- 2026Necessary but Not Sufficient: Temperature Control and Reproducibility in LLM-as-Judge Safety Evaluations24 Jun 2026
- 2026The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs15 Jun 2026
- 2026Position: AI Lock-In Is in Progress, and We Must Be Prepared28 May 2026
- 2026KBF: Knowledge Boundary as Fingerprint for Language Model and Black-Box API Auditing28 May 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Supply-Chain Poisoning Attacks Against LLM Coding Agent Skill Ecosystems
- 2025Commercial LLM Agents Are Already Vulnerable to Simple Yet Dangerous Attacks
- 2026Exploiting LLM Agent Supply Chains via Payload-less Skills
- 2026OllamaDrama: Designing and Deploying a Honeypot to Measure Attacks on Exposed LLM Infrastructure ↗
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents
- 2025A Multi-Agent LLM Defense Pipeline Against Prompt Injection Attacks
- 2026From Prompt Injection to Web Exploitation: Revisiting Classic Vulnerabilities in LLM-Integrated Applications
- 2025From Prompt Injections to Protocol Exploits: Threats in LLM-Powered AI Agents Workflows