The Gate Is Only as Honest as Its Contracts: ContractGuard for the Contract Layer of Risk-Aware Causal Gating

Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer; Rahul Suresh Babu

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2606.18550

The Gate Is Only as Honest as Its Contracts: ContractGuard for the Contract Layer of Risk-Aware Causal Gating

Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer·Rahul Suresh Babu

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Risk-Aware Causal Gating (RACG) defends tool-augmented LLM agents against indirect prompt injection by removing dangerous tools from the agent's visible action space, so that even a fully injection-compliant agent cannot call a tool it cannot see. We make three points. First, this structural guarantee does not eliminate the trust assumption behind safe tool use; it relocates it into the integrity of the tool contracts -- declared preconditions, effects, risk, and authorization -- that the gate reads, so an attacker who corrupts a contract can make the gate mis-decide without ever persuading the agent. Second, forging a tool's effects is strictly more dangerous than tampering with its risk label, because RACG applies a causal gate before its admissibility gate: an off-path tool is never exposed, so risk-relabeling alone fails, whereas effect forgery routes the dangerous tool onto the causal path and succeeds. Effect integrity, not the risk label, is the load-bearing assumption. Third, we introduce ContractGuard, a verifier between the registry and the gate that layers signed provenance, typed contract attestation, and runtime effect verification; on a controlled benchmark it restores injection success to zero against every modeled attack -- including an exhaustive white-box adaptive attacker -- without over-rejecting honest contracts, and the structural prediction is confirmed on six current-generation hosted models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5; Amazon Nova Premier and Nova 2 Lite; GPT-OSS-120B).

Explore related subjects

cs.CR

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer, Rahul Suresh Babu. 2026-06-17. The Gate Is Only as Honest as Its Contracts: ContractGuard for the Contract Layer of Risk-Aware Causal Gating. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18550

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) try to determine whether a specific record was used to train a model, a privacy risk that matters in natural language processing (NLP), where training data can contain sensitive user text. This paper presents a controlled benchmark of membership inference vulnerability for text classification on the GLUE SST-2 sentiment dataset. A TF-IDF + Logistic Regression pipeline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier are compared under a loss-threshold MIA, with utility measured by development accuracy and macro F1. DistilBERT reached 0.9466 accuracy and 0.9460 macro F1 against 0.8756 and 0.8727 for Logistic Regression, yet both models leaked membership signal (Attack AUC 0.5615 and 0.5800, respectively). Two mitigations were tested. Stronger regularization reduced leakage for Logistic Regression at a visible utility cost, whereas fine-tuning DistilBERT for 2 epochs instead of 3 reduced leakage with negligible accuracy loss. Lightweight training adjustments can improve the privacy-utility trade-off without complex defenses.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Data Poisoning Attacks in Supervised Learning

Data poisoning corrupts training data to degrade a model or to plant attacker-controlled behavior. This study evaluates two representative training-time attacks, label flipping and backdoor poisoning, on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST with three baseline classifiers: Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Random Forest. Clean training is compared with poisoning rates of 5%, 10%, and 20% using clean-test accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, macro-F1, and, for backdoors, attack success rate. Label flipping caused clear degradation, largest for Logistic Regression and Linear SVM, while Random Forest stayed comparatively stable. Backdoor poisoning reached attack success rates from 0.9667 to 1.0000 on both datasets and all three models while often keeping clean-test performance near baseline. The results separate indiscriminate poisoning, which shows up in standard metrics, from targeted backdoor poisoning, which stays comparatively stealthy while embedding highly effective malicious behavior, and they support security-oriented evaluation beyond conventional clean-test metrics.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

DeFiFusion: Combining Transaction Events with Smart Contracts to Detect Price Manipulation Attacks

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a rapidly growing blockchain-based financial service, where market transaction dynamics and underlying smart contract logic are intricately intertwined. This autonomous interplay, while eliminating centralized intermediaries, significantly expands the vulnerability surface of DeFi protocols to Price Manipulation Attacks (PMAs), which have already inflicted catastrophic financial losses. Despite their gravity, existing detection paradigms suffer from fundamental limitations. Transaction-centric methods lack awareness of contract execution semantics, making them prone to false positives under legitimate market volatility, while static contract analyses ignore real transaction behaviors and frequently report vulnerabilities that are infeasible to exploit in practice. We present DeFiFusion, a dual-modal PMA detection framework that closes this gap by jointly modeling transaction events and smart contract semantics within a unified pipeline. Our core insight is that PMA maliciousness emerges only from the interaction between transaction behaviors and the contract logic they exploit; neither signal suffices in isolation. Accordingly, we derive price-manipulation-aware event encoding for extracting fine-grained temporal and economic features tailored to manipulation patterns. We further introduce LLM-based contract semantic extraction to supply the execution-logic context that prior behavioral methods lack. To fuse these modalities, we propose a Dual-Modal Projection-Fusion Transformer with T5-style relative positional encoding, capturing the cyclic multi-stage execution structures that distinguish PMAs from benign market activity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeFiFusion consistently achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, effectively recalling 222 of the 225 PMA cases while maintaining a precision of 96.10%.

cs.CR↗