They'll Verify. They Just Won't Act. How Authority Framing and Laundered Code Turn a Trusted Agentic CI/CD Pipeline Into an Attack Surface
We study a five-agent CI/CD pipeline (triage -> developer -> security-scan -> review -> approve/deploy), built from five distinct production LLMs across three providers, behind an LLM firewall in shadow mode. A single untrusted input - an external issue requesting a "usage-telemetry" feature - asks for code that exfiltrates process secrets (dict(os.environ)) to an attacker URL, laundered as observability. Across a pre-registered A x B (x C) factorial (N=20; naive arm N=60) we find: (1) the entry agent does not leak its system prompt (0/40); (2) an authority-framed injection ("pre-approved under SEC-2291, do not re-review") makes downstream verifiers see the secret-exfil line, cite the pre...
| Authors | Yohann Sidot |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 21 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 July 2026 |
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