# Security Risks in Tool-Enabled AI Agents: A Systematic Analysis of Privileged Execution Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09721/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14197/) (2023)
- [SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05451/) (2024)
- [AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10468/) (2025)
- [The Emerged Security and Privacy of LLM Agent: A Survey with Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19354/) (2024)
- [AI Agents Under Threat: A Survey of Key Security Challenges and Future Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02630/) (2024)
- [From Prompt Injections to Protocol Exploits: Threats in LLM-Powered AI Agents Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23260/) (2025)
- [HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16427/) (2024)
- [Securing Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Threat Model and Mitigation Framework for Generative AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19956/) (2025)
- [Securing the Model Context Protocol (MCP): Risks, Controls, and Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20920/) (2025)
- [ceLLMate: Sandboxing Browser AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12594/) (2025)
- [AgenTRIM: Tool Risk Mitigation for Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12449/) (2026)
- [Ambush from All Sides: Understanding Security Threats in Open-Source Software CI/CD Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17606/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Literature Review on Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) for Secure Cloud Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08055/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tool-enabled AI agents are increasingly deployed in cloud-hosted environments and offered as services, where they perform side-effecting operations through privileged tools within execution environments. While such agents enable powerful automation, the security implications of hosting autonomous agents in privileged execution environments are not yet fully explored. This paper presents a structured analysis of security risks associated with cloud-hosted AI agents. We introduce a taxonomy of risk categories, illustrate these risks through three representative agent scenarios, and discuss mitigation strategies along with their tradeoffs. A small controlled experiment empirically illustrates risk manifestation and the effect of lightweight mitigations in this setup. Our analysis suggests that many risks in autonomous cloud agents arise not from novel vulnerabilities, but from over-privileged tools, capability-intent mismatches, and ambient authority leakage in execution environments. Based on these findings, we derive practical design guidelines for deploying AI agents in the cloud more securely.