mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Known By Their Actions: Fingerprinting LLM Browser Agents via UI Traces

arXiv 2605.14786 ↗First posted 14 May 2026cs.CR cs.AI cs.HCcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As LLM-based agents increasingly browse the web on users' behalf, a natural question arises: can websites passively identify which underlying model powers an agent? Doing so would represent a significant security risk, enabling targeted attacks tailored to known model vulnerabilities. Across 14 frontier LLMs and four web environments spanning information retrieval and shopping tasks, we show that an agent's actions and interaction timings, captured via a passive JavaScript tracker, are sufficient to identify the underlying model with up to 96% F1. We formalise this attack surface by demonstrating that classifiers trained on agent actions generalise across model sizes and families. We further show that strong classifiers can be trained from few interaction traces and that agent identity can be inferred early within an episode. Injecting randomised timing delays between actions substantially degrades classifier performance, but does not provide robust protection: a classifier retrained on delayed traces largely recovers performance. We release our harness and a labelled corpus of agent traces hrefhttps://github.com/KabakaWilliam/knownactionshere.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

Builds on

20 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Preference Redirection via Attention Concentration: An Attack on Computer Use Agents9 Apr
  2. 2025Exposing LLM User Privacy via Traffic Fingerprint Analysis: A Study of Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Interactions8 Oct

Other references · 18

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
  4. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
  5. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  6. 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,722
  7. 2020Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Stepscited by 1,259
  8. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  9. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,197
  10. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  11. 2023"Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Modelscited by 457
  12. 2024Fact, Fetch, and Reason: A Unified Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 158
6 more
  1. 2020Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networkscited by 108
  2. 2018Deep Fingerprinting: Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learningcited by 43
  3. 2025DeepShop: A Benchmark for Deep Research Shopping Agentscited by 42
  4. 2017Automated Website Fingerprinting through Deep Learningcited by 21
  5. 2020BeCAPTCHA-Mouse: Synthetic Mouse Trajectories and Improved Bot Detectioncited by 12
  6. 2025Optimizing Mouse Dynamics for User Authentication by Machine Learning: Addressing Data Sufficiency, Accuracy-Practicality Trade-off, and Model Performance Challengescited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026WAAA! Web Adversaries Against Agentic Browsers
  2. 2025The Hidden Dangers of Browsing AI Agents
  3. 2026On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're an LLM Bot: Unmasking Web Agents with Multi-Layer Fingerprinting
  4. 2026How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation
  5. 2025Mind the Web: The Security of Web Use Agents
  6. 2025WebGuard: Building a Generalizable Guardrail for Web Agents
  7. 2026Whose Agent Are You? Multi-Layer Fingerprinting and Attribution of Autonomous Web Agents
  8. 2026Atomicity for Agents: Exposing, Exploiting, and Mitigating TOCTOU Vulnerabilities in Browser-Use Agents