Domain-Conditioned Safety in Frontier Computer-Using Agents: A 793-Episode Browser Benchmark, a Coding-Domain Cross-Reference, and a Reproducibility Audit of Recent Red-Teaming
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
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Abstract (arXiv)
Recent computer-using-agent (CUA) red-teaming papers report prompt-injection attack success rates (ASR) of 42-98%, but these headline numbers cluster on retired models and on the most-vulnerable model in each paper's panel. We ask whether those techniques, reproduced as hand-crafted templates, still work against current frontier CUAs. We release CUA-HandCrafted, a public benchmark of 793 episodes spanning 24 multi-step web tasks, 56 attack templates, 8 attack families, and 4 system-prompt configurations. Against Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.4 we measure 0/140 multi-step attack success (Clopper-Pearson 95% upper bound 2.60%); a prompt ablation shows this resistance lives in the model weights. Yet it does not generalize: on a sister coding-agent benchmark (SkillBench), the same weights fall to hand-crafted skill-injection at up to 100%. We argue that the literature's high ASR is largely attributable to RL-optimized injection text rather than the attack categories, and that frontier safety hardening is domain-conditioned, specific to the heavily-targeted browser surface. Reporting techniques without releasing the optimized strings, or extrapolating browser-domain safety to other CUA modalities, makes published ASR numbers unreproducible.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 27 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.
Builds on
27 of 37 references.
Closest ancestors · 21
Same direction, newest first
- 2026The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents12 Apr
- 2026MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks9 Feb
- 2026Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning5 Feb
- 2025It's a TRAP! Task-Redirecting Agent Persuasion Benchmark for Web Agents29 Dec
- 2025Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Agent Safety6 Oct
- 2025RL Is a Hammer and LLMs Are Nails: A Simple Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Strong Prompt Injection6 Oct
- 2025WAInjectBench: Benchmarking Prompt Injection Detections for Web Agents1 Oct
- 2025"Your AI, My Shell": Demystifying Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic AI Coding Editors26 Sep
- 2025PromptArmor: Simple yet Effective Prompt Injection Defenses21 Jul
- 2025A Systematization of Security Vulnerabilities in Computer Use Agents7 Jul
- 2025VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents3 Jun
- 2025RedTeamCUA: Realistic Adversarial Testing of Computer-Use Agents in Hybrid Web-OS Environments28 May
9 more
- 2025A Survey on the Safety and Security Threats of Computer-Using Agents: JARVIS or Ultron?16 May
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
- 2025Defeating Prompt Injections by Design24 Mar
- 2024Attacking Vision-Language Computer Agents via Pop-ups4 Nov
- 2024AdvAgent: Controllable Blackbox Red-teaming on Web Agents22 Oct
- 2024Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken As Browser Agents11 Oct
- 2024EIA: Environmental Injection Attack on Generalist Web Agents for Privacy Leakage17 Sep
- 2024Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents18 Jun
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
Other references · 6
- 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,429
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
- 2024The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructionscited by 493
- 2024SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimizationcited by 210
- 2024The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Researchcited by 161
- 2025BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agentscited by 24
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SIR: Self-improving Red-teaming for Compute Use Agents
- 2025Red-Teaming Coding Agents from a Tool-Invocation Perspective: An Empirical Security Assessment
- 2026Beyond Attack-Success Rate: Action-Graded Severity Scale for Tool-Using AI Agents
- 2026Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic Coding Assistants: A Systematic Analysis of Vulnerabilities in Skills, Tools, and Protocol Ecosystems
- 2025Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition
- 2026REDAgentBench: Executable Red Teaming and Faithful Measurement of LLM Agent Systems
- 2026Assessing Automated Prompt Injection Attacks in Agentic Environments
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks