Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.03014

Beyond Predefined Sinks: Security-Aware Dependency Analysis for LLM Agents

Abstract

Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly connect model-generated decisions to security-sensitive software capabilities such as command execution, filesystem access, network communication, browser control, and external tools. Existing analyses often use predefined sensitive operations as anchors, but operation identity alone is insufficient to determine security implications. We present AgentSecGraph, a security-aware static analysis framework that constructs a candidate-centered Security-Aware Agent Dependency Graph (Security-ADG) for each security-sensitive operation. It augments operation identity with agent relevance, source and dependency evidence, trust-boundary context, guard evidence, and external-effect semantics. We further introduce AgentSecBench, a corpus of 67 real-world LLM-agent repositories spanning 11 ecosystems and 37,542 source files. The current analyzer identifies 23,866 static security-sensitive operation candidates across 65 repositories and emits one Security-ADG artifact per candidate. Corpus-wide analysis recovers source-to-operation dependency evidence for 9,821 candidates (41.15%) and potential guard evidence for 3,075 (12.88%), completing in 50.8 minutes. Using a separate reproduction-backed evaluation layer, we establish 22 security-sensitive behaviors across 13 repositories: one confirmed vulnerability, one pending disclosure candidate, and 20 guarded behaviors. In nine held-out cases, Security-ADG preserves 91.1% of the reference context and all five observed guards, compared with 20.0% for a sink-only view and 40.0% for a simplified ADG. These results show that security-aware dependency and contextual evidence enable distinctions that cannot be recovered from sensitive-operation identity alone.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Hang Cui. 2026-10-02. Beyond Predefined Sinks: Security-Aware Dependency Analysis for LLM Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03014

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

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

PPFedIT: Towards Privacy-Preserving Federated Instruction Tuning with Few-shot Local Examples

Instruction tuning aligns large language models (LLMs) with human intentions but requires diverse, high-quality data that are difficult to collect in privacy-sensitive domains. Federated instruction tuning (FedIT) enables collaborative training across data owners, yet existing methods typically assume sufficient local data. In realistic few-shot settings, limited samples can cause overfitting, degrade performance, and increase vulnerability to training data extraction attacks. We propose PPFedIT, a federated algorithm that improves both model performance and privacy protection in federated few-shot learning. It comprises three client-side steps: (1) synthetic data generation, which uses LLMs to diversify and enrich local data; (2) parameter isolation training, which updates the shared global LLM on synthetic data and local LLMs on private local data to mitigate synthetic-data noise; and (3) local aggregation then sharing, which mixes global and local model parameters before uploading them for server aggregation to mitigate data extraction attacks. Experiments on three open-source datasets show that PPFedIT improves model performance by an average of 8.4% and reduces the risk of data extraction attacks by approximately 20% in challenging federated few-shot settings.

cs.CR↗

Logit-Gap Steering: A Forward-Pass Diagnostic for Alignment Robustness

RLHF-style alignment trains language models to refuse unsafe requests, but how much operational margin does this refusal rest on? We introduce the refusal-affirmation logit gap: the difference between the top refusal-token logit and the top affirmative-token logit at the first decoding step. This single scalar quantifies the per-prompt safety margin that alignment provides. Empirically, alignment widens the gap on 97.5-99.8% of toxic prompts across three model families, and median gap closure co-varies with True-ASR ranking across suffix strategies (an internal consistency check, since our method optimises gap closure). To validate the metric's practical significance, we present logit-gap steering, a gradient-free, forward-pass-only method that discovers short in-distribution suffixes ($<$10 tokens per component) whose cumulative effect closes the gap. The method requires ${\approx}26{,}000$ forward-pass equivalents per family (${\approx}2$~min on one A100), ${\approx}125\times$ less than a single GCG search. Suffixes discovered on 0.5B--2B models transfer without modification to 72B within family. An 8-suffix ensemble reaches 38-96\% True ASR across 13 models on AdvBench and HarmBench, with most suffixes having $10^{3}$-$10^{4}\times$ lower perplexity than GCG-meaning published perplexity-filter defenses that collapse GCG (64.7%$\to$1.0%) leave our suffixes nearly intact (76.9%$\to$76.0%). These results demonstrate that current alignment margins, while consistently present, can be thin and efficiently measurable, and that defense strategies must account for in-distribution suffixes.

cs.CR↗

Spoofing Missed-Detection Bounds for PRF GNSS Ranging Authentication Under AWGN Models

Pseudorandom-function (PRF) ranging codes, such as those used in Galileo's encrypted E6-C under the Signal Authentication Service (SAS), enable a receiver to authenticate pseudoranges once the PRF secret is revealed. This work bounds how much authentication security the receiver obtains under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) assumptions. Against a spoofer that does not estimate the code before submitting its forgery, PRF security makes the forged correlation zero-mean up to the security of the underlying PRF, allowing integration time and C/N$_0$ to mostly determine probability of missed detection (PMD) and probability of false alarm (PFA). Against such a spoofer at a conservative 30 dB-Hz, 400 ms of E6-C aggregation certifies a PMD below $2^{-128}$ (plus any PRF advantage). For a spoofer that estimates chips before submitting a forgery, I derive the receiving-antenna gain at which authentication security breaks, which is about 12 dB for E6-C for the adversaries modeled. This work can be used to design a PRF GNSS ranging code protocol and a receiver capable of correctly asserting PRF ranging security assuming an AWGN model.

cs.CR↗