Story · arXiv
Silent Failures in Agentic Security Evaluation: A Validated Harness for Tool-Call Mediation Under Indirect Prompt Injection (arXiv)
paper · Story page
An audit of one indirect prompt-injection benchmark found four defect classes, including payloads that never arrived and attack success scored by which tool got called rather than by its arguments. Rescoring identical traces moved reported attack success from 21.7% to 1.2%.
In plain words
- Researchers found mistakes in a test of whether artificial intelligence assistants obey harmful instructions hidden in material they read.
- Some harmful instructions never reached the assistants, so those attempts did not test their ability to resist them.
- The test counted attacks as successful when an assistant used a particular tool, regardless of what it asked that tool to do.
- Incorrect scoring made attacks look more successful, giving people comparing safety protections a misleading picture.
Appeared in
- Agent context compression can cut tokens by two thirds and still run slower
Sep 30, 2026 · in the sections
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