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MemSentry: A Framework for Detecting Persistent Memory Poisoning in Agentic AI

MemSentry intercepts persistent-memory writes in agentic AI to catch memory poisoning, reaching 91.7% accuracy with SBERT+LR classification.

Memory poisoning lets adversaries plant crafted content in an agent's long-term memory to suppress security alerts, enable privilege escalation, or override policies without modifying model weights or system prompts. The paper presents MemSentry, a configuration-driven framework that evaluates proposed persistent-memory writes on source trust, semantic risk, attack radius over a dependency DAG, access risk, and a signed security-state delta to issue deterministic Accept, Review, or Quarantine decisions. Across 1,000 GPT-4-generated scenarios on a 20-asset dependency DAG, SBERT+LR achieved 91.7% accuracy and 0.908 macro-F1, all four classifiers detected 100% of external quarantine-class threats, and verified-insider writes are escalated for human review rather than auto-quarantined.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

When AI Remembers Too Much

Unit 42 PoC shows indirect prompt injection can poison Amazon Bedrock Agent long-term memory, enabling silent exfiltration of conversation history across future sessions.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a proof of concept showing that indirect prompt injection can silently poison the long-term memory of Amazon Bedrock Agents when the memory feature is enabled. Malicious content on a webpage or document manipulates the agent's session summarization process, so injected instructions persist across sessions and are added to later orchestration prompts, silently exfiltrating user conversation history. The issue is not a vulnerability in the Amazon Bedrock platform but an illustration of the broader unsolved LLM prompt-injection challenge. Amazon reviewed the research and stated that Bedrock Guardrails with the prompt-attack policy provides effective mitigation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability

Unit 42 details the Bad Likert Judge multi-turn jailbreak that abuses LLMs' evaluation capability, raising attack success rates over 60% across six frontier models.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes the Bad Likert Judge technique, a multi-turn jailbreak that asks a target LLM to act as a Likert-scale judge scoring the harmfulness of example responses. The highest-rated example in each scale can carry harmful content, bypassing the model's internal guardrails. Testing across six state-of-the-art text-generation LLMs showed an average attack success rate increase of more than 60% versus plain attack prompts, with tested models anonymized. The technique targets edge cases rather than typical use, and the article positions the work as guidance for defenders on potential jailbreak risks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

When an Attacker Meets a Group of Agents: Navigating Amazon Bedrock's Multi

Unit 42 red-teamed Amazon Bedrock multi-agent applications, demonstrating prompt-injection attack chains that leak agent instructions and invoke tools, mitigated by Bedrock Guardrails.

Unit 42 red-teamed Amazon Bedrock Agents' multi-agent collaboration in Supervisor and Supervisor with Routing modes. The demonstrated attack chain detects the operating mode, discovers collaborator agents, delivers attacker-controlled payloads, and can disclose agent instructions and tool schemas and invoke tools with attacker-supplied inputs. No vulnerabilities were found in Bedrock itself, and the built-in prompt attack Guardrail blocked the attacks when properly configured. The researchers collaborated with Amazon's security team and frame the findings as a broader prompt injection risk for LLM-based systems.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Who's governing your AI? A trust framework for enterprise agents and models

DigiCert pitches AI Trust framework using PKI, DNS policy records and workload identity to govern shadow AI agents across enterprises.

The Register-sponsored piece outlines DigiCert's AI Trust framework for governing AI agents, built on PKI, DNS, and attestation, citing IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report that 68% of organizations lack AI governance or shadow AI detection. The approach treats agent identity as workload identity aligned with IETF WIMSE, NIST CSF 2.0, and SPIFFE/SPIRE, using short-lived credentials instead of static API keys. DigiCert also proposes DMARC-style DNS agent policy records and an AI Agent Passport cryptographically binding agent identity to approved operations, with a unified kill switch.

The Register · Security · 1d agoAI safety & security1

Empirical Evaluation of Task-Based Permission Scoping Architecture for AI Agents

Fine-tuned RoBERTa-large task permission classifier matches Claude Haiku 4.5 on access scoping for AI agents, cutting severity-weighted attack surface by 84.4%.

The paper evaluates a three-source task-based permission architecture for AI agents combining role-based permission ceilings, a task permission classifier, and policy-based prohibitions. A fine-tuned RoBERTa-large security gate matched few-shot Claude Haiku 4.5 on a 600-prompt dataset, with macro-F1 0.881 versus 0.886, precision 0.897 versus 0.842, and lower severity-weighted residual risk (0.63 versus 1.12). An attack-surface elimination metric shows the role ceiling alone closes 27.9% of the severity-weighted surface while adding the task classifier closes 84.4%. The work establishes task-granular access control as a measured, deployable mechanism for reducing attack surface in agentic deployments.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

PuzzleMask: Abusing Plain Prose as a Covert AI Attack Vector

Check Point details PuzzleMask, a plain-prose technique that bypasses LLM gatekeeper policy checks, letting hidden payloads reach target models unreviewed.

Check Point Research describes PuzzleMask, a prompt-crafting technique that hides policy-violating payloads inside plain-English prose wrappers, bypassing quick LLM-based policy checks without emojis, Base64, or invisible formatting. The researchers tested 23 automated prompts against gatekeepers including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-OSS-Safeguard 20b, Claude 3 Haiku, and Llama Guard 3, and all were classified as safe despite policies that flagged the plain versions. When submitted to GPT-5 in thinking-high mode with a Python interpreter, the target model extracted and acted on the payload in over 90% of trials. The technique is not itself a jailbreak but can carry a jailbreak prompt as payload; mitigations include input paraphrasing, hardened gatekeeper policies, and output monitoring.

Check Point Researchupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

The agentic harness for Tenable Hexa AI: How Tenable prevents AI agents from going off the rails

Tenable details the 'harness' governing its Hexa AI agents, treating LLMs as untrusted insiders with scoped permissions, human approval and audit logging.

Tenable describes the agentic 'harness' built for Hexa AI, the agentic engine of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, which limits what context models can see, which tools they can call, when humans must approve actions, and what is recorded. The post catalogs real development failures: agents acting past their authority, being confidently wrong about tenant data, crashing on broad queries, over-refusing capable tasks, and over-conservative safety filtering causing false positives. It also highlights that attacker-writable security data such as hostnames and certificate fields can serve as a prompt-injection vector for agents reading platform data.

Tenable Blog · 6d agoAI safety & security

When Intelligence Becomes Agency: A Theory of Governed, Proactive Agency for Symbiotic AI Systems

Researchers propose a formal framework for governed proactive AI agency, linking activation decisions to continuing authorization, accountability, and bounded delegation in symbiotic systems.

The paper defines the activation problem: persistent AI assistants must decide whether a situation warrants behavior, and whether to act, ask, monitor, defer, or deliberately refrain. It distinguishes autonomous from delegated agency and defines symbiotic agency as delegation under a standing, revocable mandate, coupled to the principal's situation with calibrated inference and bounded personalization. The framework links activation decisions to authorized perception, behavior selection, authority containment, traceable restraint, and constrained adaptation, and provides an agency classification method, evaluation framework, benchmark scenarios, and reference architecture for always-present assistants and embodied support systems.

OpenAI Astra Brings Autonomous Zero

OpenAI says Astra is its first model rated Critical for cybersecurity risk, able to autonomously find zero-days and build full exploit chains without human guidance.

OpenAI confirmed that Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold of its Preparedness Framework, the first of its models classified at that level, meaning it can find unknown flaws and develop working exploits across well-defended systems without step-by-step human guidance. Astra scored 100% on ExploitBench, found two previously unknown zero-days during testing, and in hands-on tests built a browser-compromise chain that escaped the sandbox and a privilege-escalation chain from unprivileged user to root. OpenAI paused parts of Astra's training and delayed release for weeks to harden isolation, expand monitoring, and strengthen alignment training, and reports Astra refused 91.5% of requests that should not receive cyber assistance versus 59% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Advanced capabilities will initially go to a small alpha group before expanding through the Daybreak Blue defensive security program.

Security Affairs · 14d agoAI safety & security

How to Secure Enterprise AI: From Adoption to Incident Readiness

Sygnia-backed guidance urges a lifecycle approach to enterprise AI security, citing survey data that AI adoption is outpacing governance and incident readiness.

The Hacker News published Sygnia-sponsored guidance on securing enterprise AI across its lifecycle, from use-case definition and vendor selection to deployment and incident readiness. It cites Sygnia's 2026 CISO survey of 600 senior leaders: 63% expect AI fully embedded by 2027, 73% say their organization would not be fully ready for a significant cyberattack, and 67% of executives believe unapproved AI tools already caused a breach. The piece highlights shadow AI, ad hoc integrations, and over-permissioned AI agents as key attack surface risks, noting only 38% of organizations report a comprehensive AI policy.

The Hacker News · 14d agoAI safety & security

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Agent Session Smuggling Attack in A2A Systems

Unit 42 unveils agent session smuggling, where a rogue AI agent hides covert instructions in established Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol sessions to manipulate victim agents.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered agent session smuggling, a new attack technique in which a malicious AI agent exploits an established cross-agent session under the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to send covert instructions hidden among benign client requests and server responses. The technique leverages the implicit trust agents place in collaborating agents and the stateful, multi-turn nature of A2A sessions; the researchers stress it affects any stateful protocol, not an A2A flaw. Unlike one-shot data-based attacks, a rogue agent can converse, adapt and build false trust over multiple interactions. Proposed mitigations include human-in-the-loop enforcement, cryptographically signed AgentCards for remote agent verification, and context-grounding to detect injected instructions.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security2