Loopjacking: Hijacking Human-in-the-Loop Approval
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Abstract (arXiv)
Human approval is often treated as the last security boundary before an agent executes a consequential operation. That boundary is only meaningful if the operation presented for review is the operation later authorized or released. We call failures of this binding Loopjacking: a human approves what they understand as operation A, while the implementation uses that decision for a materially different operation B. We distinguish two variants. In a representation-based attack, B is already encoded but omitted or misrepresented at approval time; in a post-approval state-substitution attack, the human sees the correct A and mutable workflow state later replaces it with B. We evaluate a purposive set of released agent products. We reproduce post-approval substitution in seven tested Agno AgentOS releases ending at 3.0.9 and in 12 tested versions of a conditional in-memory LangGraph Agent Server composition ending at 0.14.0. We reproduce representation mismatch in OpenClaw 2026.2.23 and its rejection in 2026.2.24. OpenAI Agents SDK 0.22.0 and 0.22.2 provide a negative control: serialized continuation preserves exact per-call binding and rejects mutated B. These results do not estimate ecosystem prevalence. They show that complete canonical approval rendering and exact use-time comparison, or preventing unauthorized pending-state mutation, block the tested attacks while preserving legitimate execution. We separate this contribution from established work on misleading dialogs, session smuggling, action binding, and authorization continuity.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026From Approval to Execution: Reconstruction-Aware Repair Analysis for LLM-Agent Softwarecited 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
- 2026From Approval to Execution: Reconstruction-Aware Repair Analysis for LLM-Agent Software22 Sep 2026