Structurally Close, Temporally Distant: Measuring Security Exposure in Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Long-horizon LLM agents interact with untrusted content, persistent memory, external state, and sensitive tools. Existing analyses often characterize attacks by the number of execution steps between malicious input and a downstream action. We show that temporal remoteness can overstate security separation in stateful agents. We introduce a provenance-aware execution graph linking agent events through deterministic state, identifier, and tool provenance, and define \emph{influence distance} $\DI$ as the shortest structural path from an untrusted source to a sensitive action. We compare it with \emph{sequence distance} $\DT$, the shortest injection--sink path in the ordered trajectory. Sinc...
| Authors | Md Jafrin Hossain, Nur Al Hasan Haldar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 5 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 September 2026 |
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