When the Manual Lies: A Realistic Benchmark to Evaluate MCP Poisoning Attacks for LLM Agents
The rise of tool-using Large Language Model (LLM) agents, standardized by protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), has unlocked unprecedented autonomous execution capabilities for LLM Agents by integrating external open-domain knowledge and tools. However, this interoperability introduces a covert attack surface targeting the agent's cognitive planning layer. This paper systematically investigates Tool Description Poisoning (TDP), a novel semantic attack. In TDP, malicious instructions are not embedded in a tool's executable code, but rather covertly injected into its descriptive metadata, the very "manual" an agent relies on for secure planning and decision-making. To rigorously ...
| Authors | Shi Liu, Xuehai Tang, Xikang Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 22 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 May 2026 |
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