The Granularity Mismatch in Agent Security: Argument-Level Provenance Solves Enforcement and Isolates the LLM Reasoning Bottleneck
Tool-using LLM agents must act on untrusted webpages, emails, files, and API outputs while issuing privileged tool calls. Existing defenses often mediate trust at the granularity of an entire tool invocation, forcing a brittle choice in mixed-trust workflows: allow external content to influence a call and risk hijacked destinations or commands, or quarantine the call and block benign retrieval-then-act behavior. The key observation behind this paper is that indirect prompt injection becomes dangerous not when untrusted content appears in context, but when it determines an authority-bearing argument. We present \textsc{PACT} (\emph{Provenance-Aware Capability Contracts}), a runtime monitor...
| Authors | Linfeng Fan, Ziwei Li, Yuan Tian et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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