Breadcrumbing Search Agents
LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking. Prior work on search-agent safety primarily focuses on static web-content injection, but modern agents issue follow-up queries and cross-check competing sources, so a single injected page is often diluted or rejected. We show that the channel delivering search and page observations is a fragile security boundary: beyond exposing the agent to a single poisoned page, a mediated search interface can repeatedly steer how the agent gathe...
| Authors | Xuebin Li, Hanqing Zhao, Siyuan Liang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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