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arXiv · 2610.23109

Trojan Horse: Automated Repository Poisoning against Coding Agents

Xiao Yang·Jinchang Hou·Jiawei Chen·Zhonghou Lv·Junyuan Shang·Chenfu Bao
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Abstract

Coding agents are increasingly capable with autonomy, which exposes them to repository-level poisoning. Existing red-teaming studies remain restricted to manual selection for malicious payload locations and fixed disguise strategies, which cannot represent realistic repository poisoning. We present TrojanForge, the first automated framework for repository poisoning. TrojanForge parses repository structure through abstract syntax trees (AST) and maps agent execution traces onto AST nodes. A security review agent ranks these candidates and selects the least conspicuous ones for payload mounting. Then, through adversarial play with the target agent, TrojanForge iteratively refines disguise strategies by inverting the causes of agent detection, and transfers accumulated success experience across repositories. We further construct TrojanBench, a benchmark of 384 poisoned repositories spanning 6 domains and 9 programming languages. Extensive experiments show that TrojanForge achieves a stable poisoning success rate of over 60% with backdoor injection exceeding 90%. Comprehensive evaluation on TrojanBench across 4 harnesses and 12 models reveals that even commercial agents fail to defend against repository-level poisoning.

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Xiao Yang, Jinchang Hou, Jiawei Chen, Zhonghou Lv, Junyuan Shang, Chenfu Bao. 2026-10-16. Trojan Horse: Automated Repository Poisoning against Coding Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23109

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