From Approval to Abuse: Privilege Escalation Attacks on Harness-Protected Coding Agents
Coding agents use execution harnesses to constrain the consequences of prompt injection by enforcing permission boundaries. These systems deterministically intercept any out-of-sandbox action and prompt the user for approval. To reduce approval fatigue, users can approve allow-rules proposed by the agent, after which any future action matching the rule is allowed without a prompt. In this work, we show that this mechanism introduces a new risk: untrusted context can influence the permissions presented for approval, with consequences extending beyond the immediate task. We investigate privilege escalation targeting this permission-update process. Specifically, adversarial context planted i...
| Authors | Xianglin Yang, Yechao Zhang, Jiahao Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 5 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 23 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.