What You Approve Is What Executes: Consent Integrity for Black-Box LLM Agents
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Abstract (arXiv)
Coding agents gate consequential actions behind a human-in-the-loop approval dialog, but the dialog is narrated by the agent itself: the human approves a summary the agent writes. The Lies-in-the-Loop (LITL) attack shows that summary is forgeable, so a compromised agent can show a benign description while a different action runs. This paper names the missing property, Consent Integrity, by importing What You See Is What You Sign (WYSIWYS) and the trusted-path property into the agent approval channel: the action shown to the human must be rendered by a trusted mediator from the real action at the boundary, not the agent's narration, over a path the agent cannot spoof, and bound to the exact action that executes. Two twists distinguish it from classical WYSIWYS: the renderer is the adversary, and the boundary ground truth is a low-level event that must be decoded without trusting the agent. Since no decoder is complete, the realizable target is analyzer-relative: whatever the analyzer cannot classify is surfaced as uninspectable rather than silently approved. A prototype implements the analyzer, renderer, and bind-to-execution; total mediation and the trusted path are specified but assumed, not implemented. On GTFOBins, an independent corpus of 1330 trusted-tool abuses, the prototype silently passes 10.0% (every instance through a trusted tool); on tldr, 28,798 normal-usage commands, it marks 87.0% uninspectable. These two independent measurements bracket the design's central tension: the trust list that bounds silent passes is the same one that drives over-prompting, and a boundary-only mediator can move along that frontier but not escape it. The contribution is the property, the mechanism, and an honest position on that frontier, not a solved defense.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026Resume Means Resume: A Machine-Checked Conformance Contract for Checkpoint, Interrupt, and Resume Semantics in Workflow Persistence Layerscited by 3
- 2026The Verifiable Action Card: Trustworthy Human-in-the-Loop Control for Secure Autonomous Agentscited by 2
- 2026One Goal, Many Commands: Characterizing Denylist Fragility in AI Agentscited by 1
- 2026From Approval to Execution: Reconstruction-Aware Repair Analysis for LLM-Agent Softwarecited by 0
- 2026Beyond Approved Actions: Runtime Validation of Persistent Outcomes in Agent Workflowscited by 0
- 2026Authorization Closure Graph: Minimal Repair for LLM Agents with Evolving User Instructionscited by 0
- 2026Boundary-State Control for Tool-Using Language-Model Agents: Commit-Time Consistency under State Driftcited by 0
- 2026Janus: Evidence-Before-Effect Sagas and Offline-Verifiable Provenance for Agentic LLMscited by 0
- 2026Approval Laundering: Systematizing Approval--Execution Binding Failures in AI Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 0
- 2026Approval Laundering: Systematizing Approval--Execution Binding Failures in AI Coding-Agent Harnesses30 Sep 2026
- 2026Janus: Evidence-Before-Effect Sagas and Offline-Verifiable Provenance for Agentic LLMs29 Sep 2026
- 2026Boundary-State Control for Tool-Using Language-Model Agents: Commit-Time Consistency under State Drift26 Sep 2026
- 2026Authorization Closure Graph: Minimal Repair for LLM Agents with Evolving User Instructions26 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Approved Actions: Runtime Validation of Persistent Outcomes in Agent Workflows25 Sep 2026
- 2026From Approval to Execution: Reconstruction-Aware Repair Analysis for LLM-Agent Software22 Sep 2026
- 2026The Verifiable Action Card: Trustworthy Human-in-the-Loop Control for Secure Autonomous Agents16 Sep 2026
- 2026Resume Means Resume: A Machine-Checked Conformance Contract for Checkpoint, Interrupt, and Resume Semantics in Workflow Persistence Layers4 Aug 2026
- 2026One Goal, Many Commands: Characterizing Denylist Fragility in AI Agents14 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026They'll Verify. They Just Won't Act. How Authority Framing and Laundered Code Turn a Trusted Agentic CI/CD Pipeline Into an Attack Surface
- 2026Silence Is Endorsement: Verification-Status Laundering in LLM Agent Pipelines
- 2026Agent Approval Laundering: Transitive Effects Beyond the Approved Invocation ↗
- 2026The Agent Knew: Internal States Forecast Unauthorized Actions and Stop Them, and the Lies That Follow
- 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestration
- 2026Activation Probes Surface Code-Security Signals that the Model's Output Misses
- 2026Before Agent Tells The Lie: Has Deception Already Been Represented?
- 2026You Can't Escape Your Own Activations : Evaluation Awareness and Multi-Agent Monitoring