mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Divide and Inject: Can Agents Reconstruct an Indirect Prompt Injection from Fragments?

arXiv 2609.36576 ↗First posted 29 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

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Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic systems are now being widely used to orchestrate tools and reason over long contexts. However, the improving capabilities of the large language models powering these agents also create new attack surfaces for indirect prompt injection. In particular, an attacker may not need to place a complete malicious instruction in retrieved content if the agent can reconstruct the objective from incomplete fragments distributed across a long context. In this work, we introduce adaptive long-context prompt injection (AdaLCPI), which combines long-context fragmentation with adaptive search. AdaLCPI splits an attack objective into incomplete fragments, embeds them in external content retrieved through the agent's tools, and uses a reconstruction cue to prompt the agent to combine them. It then iteratively refines the fragments and cue with OpenEvolve using graded scoring and natural-language execution feedback from the target agent. Empirically, AdaLCPI achieves higher attack success than strong adaptive baselines, reaching 61.4% macro-average ASR compared with 32.8% for Trojan Hippo-style and 30.0% for AgentVigil. Safety evaluations should therefore test whether agents remain robust when harmful objectives must be reconstructed from incomplete fragments.

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 22 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

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22 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Reachability-Based Capability Confinement for LLM Agents under Indirect Prompt Injection30 Aug
  2. 2026Assessing Automated Prompt Injection Attacks in Agentic Environments9 Jun
  3. 2026IterInject: Indirect Prompt Injection Against LLM Agents via Feedback-Guided Iterative Optimization23 May
  4. 2026AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attacks18 Feb
  5. 2026Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents13 Feb
  6. 2025RL Is a Hammer and LLMs Are Nails: A Simple Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Strong Prompt Injection6 Oct
  7. 2025MELON: Provable Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks in AI Agents7 Feb
  8. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar

Other references · 14

  1. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,455
  2. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
  3. 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,346
  4. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 867
  5. 2022Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Modelscited by 832
  6. 2023Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automaticallycited by 672
  7. 2015Illuminating search spaces by mapping elitescited by 425
  8. 2025The Attacker Moves Second: Stronger Adaptive Attacks Bypass Defenses Against Llm Jailbreaks and Prompt Injectionscited by 129
  9. 2024Automatic and Universal Prompt Injection Attacks against Large Language Modelscited by 119
  10. 2025Indirect Prompt Injections: Are Firewalls All You Need, or Stronger Benchmarks?cited by 18
  11. 2026Do Reasoning LLMs Refuse What They Infer in Long Contexts?cited by 3
  12. 2026MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attackscited by 3
2 more
  1. 2026Context Contamination in LLM Analysis of Network Security Logs: Poison with Passive Prompt Injection and Mitigation Evaluationcited by 3
  2. 2026D-Judge: Disrupting Multi-Turn Jailbreaks using Semantics-Preserving Output Rewritingcited by 1

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  2. 2026The Landscape of Prompt Injection Threats in LLM Agents: From Taxonomy to Analysis
  3. 2026AgentWatcher: A Rule-based Prompt Injection Monitor
  4. 2025Preventing Prompt Injection with Type-Directed Privilege Separation
  5. 2026AgentSentry: Mitigating Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents via Temporal Causal Diagnostics and Context Purification
  6. 2026Toward Metacognitive One-Shot Indirect Prompt Injection: Strategy Abstraction Via Outcome-Conditioned Reflection
  7. 2026MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks
  8. 2026Defending against Adaptive Prompt Injection Attacks via Reasoning-enabled Task Alignment