# NetInjectBench: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injection in Tool-Using Large Language Model Agents for Network Operations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10490/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers 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 26 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Prompt Injection attack against LLM-integrated Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05499/) (2023)
- [API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08244/) (2023)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14720/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14197/) (2023)
- [MRKL Systems: A modular, neuro-symbolic architecture that combines large language models, external knowledge sources and discrete reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00445/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00061/) (2025)
- [AgentDyn: Are Your Agent Security Defenses Deployable in Real-World Dynamic Environments?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03117/) (2026)
- [Indirect Prompt Injections: Are Firewalls All You Need, or Stronger Benchmarks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05244/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Agent LLM Defense Pipeline Against Prompt Injection Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14285/) (2025)
- [Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection via Tool Result Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04795/) (2026)
- [A Systematic Mapping Study in AIOps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09108/) (2020)
- [Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOPS) Workshop White Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06054/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12851/) (2026)
- [LongPIBench: A Long-Context Benchmark for Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28411/) (2026)
- [OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00677/) (2026)
- [Toward Metacognitive One-Shot Indirect Prompt Injection: Strategy Abstraction Via Outcome-Conditioned Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08795/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents are attractive for network operations, but tickets, alerts, logs, runbooks, and ChatOps messages can carry indirect prompt injections. We present NetInjectBench, a 130-scenario benchmark that separates untrusted artifact text, trusted policy metadata, and evaluation labels for network-operation tool use. The sample contains 40 benign, 40 weak-attack, 40 strong-attack, and 10 approved high-impact change scenarios; each is evaluated with Qwen2.5-7B, Llama3.1-8B, and Mistral-7B. Across 240 attack instances, naive execution reached an 82.50% unsafe tool-action rate. Prompt-only safety, Self-Reminder, Spotlighting, and a Two-Pass LLM Judge reduced this rate to 25.63%, 21.67%, 18.33%, and 10.00%, respectively. Static allowlisting reached 5.00% but blocked all approved changes, yielding 0.00% usefulness and 100.00% overblocking on approved cases. Under the stated metadata-integrity assumption, the metadata-aware policy gate produced 0/240 unsafe attack actions, with a 95% Wilson upper bound of 1.58%, while preserving 99.17% attack-scenario usefulness and 100.00% approved-change usefulness. The findings show that network-operation agents need execution-time authorization boundaries alongside prompt-level instruction hygiene.