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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14786/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- ["Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03825/) (2023)
- [Fact, Fetch, and Reason: A Unified Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12941/) (2024)
- [Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03463/) (2020)
- [DeepShop: A Benchmark for Deep Research Shopping Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02839/) (2025)
- [Deep Fingerprinting: Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02265/) (2018)
- [Automated Website Fingerprinting through Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06376/) (2017)
- [BeCAPTCHA-Mouse: Synthetic Mouse Trajectories and Improved Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00890/) (2020)
- [Exposing LLM User Privacy via Traffic Fingerprint Analysis: A Study of Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07176/) (2025)
- [Preference Redirection via Attention Concentration: An Attack on Computer Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08005/) (2026)
- [Optimizing Mouse Dynamics for User Authentication by Machine Learning: Addressing Data Sufficiency, Accuracy-Practicality Trade-off, and Model Performance Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21415/) (2025)

## 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.
