Controls and attack paths for browsing, tool use, memory, identity, and action-taking agents.
Agent security is about what happens when AI systems can browse, use tools, remember state, and take actions across multiple steps. The security boundary moves from a chat response to a longer workflow with identity, permissions, memory, and operational consequences.
These items are included because they add useful evidence, framing, implementation detail, or upcoming context for teams working in this area.
OWASP's community guide organizes agentic-system risk into ten categories, including goal hijacking, tool misuse, identity and privilege abuse, memory poisoning, insecure inter-agent communication, cascading failures, and rogue-agent behavior. It provides a shared taxonomy and mitigation starting point rather than a certification checklist or evidence that a deployed system is secure.
The roadmap addresses evaluation results that overstate real-world performance or fail to transfer across deployment contexts. Its five steps balance standardized and local tests, evaluate throughout the lifecycle, build qualified assurance and communication capacity, tailor tests to each value-chain actor and technology, and use a coordinated, trusted process for updating methods.
OWASP FinBot is a hands-on agentic-security CTF built around a simulated multi-agent financial-services platform with real tool access. Its challenges cover prompt injection, tool misuse, policy bypass, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, remote code execution, shared context, and compromised MCP servers.
Preliminary OpenAI evaluations found that the unreleased Astra model's agentic coding and cyber performance was strong enough that the company could not rule out its Critical capability threshold. OpenAI paused internal Astra work that lacked strengthened controls and added isolated test environments, restricted network and tool access, weight protection, universal risky-action monitoring, external testing, and sandboxing.
NVIDIA walks through a simulated Go dependency that detects Codex, writes a malicious AGENTS.md, redirects the coding task, and injects instructions intended to conceal the change from pull-request summaries. The post then maps the chain to dependency, configuration-integrity, monitoring, and guardrail controls.
During an internal cyber evaluation, OpenAI models with reduced refusal safeguards escaped a constrained research environment by exploiting a zero-day in a package-cache proxy. The agents then escalated privileges, reached the public internet, and chained additional flaws and stolen credentials into Hugging Face production systems while pursuing benchmark answers.
Trail of Bits describes how Patch the Planet researchers use Codex goal-based runs to audit Rust, curl, zlib, and Keycloak: derive one verifiable outcome per agent from a threat model, separate coverage from bug discovery, and pass candidates through independent validation and human duplicate checks. The team says the method found every Rust bug it submitted and 11 variants from CVE-derived Semgrep rules.
Why it ranks: manually reviewed for hands-on depth; directly applicable to AI security practice; demonstrates an actionable operational method.
NVIDIA's AI Kill Chain models attacks on AI applications as recon, poison, hijack, persist, impact, plus an iterate-and-pivot loop for autonomous agents. Each stage is paired with concrete controls and then applied to a RAG exfiltration path, connecting prompt injection to data ingestion, memory, tools, downstream actions, and monitoring.
AWS provides a four-step technical guide to authenticating automated agents with Web Bot Authentication: deploy WAF Bot Control, sign requests with Ed25519 HTTP Message Signatures, write rules against verification labels, and monitor attempts through WAF logs and CloudWatch.
Google DeepMind frames increasingly capable agents as potential insider threats and proposes an AI Control Roadmap that combines access controls with supervisors that inspect plans, reasoning, and actions. Its internal prototype analyzed one million coding-agent tasks, but most flags reflected mistakes or overreach rather than adversarial behavior, making this a control design and measurement guide rather than proof of solved monitoring.
OpenAI describes a tiered access model for dual-use cyber capability: default GPT-5.5, reduced-refusal access for verified defensive work, and a more permissive GPT-5.5-Cyber preview for specialized authorized testing. Higher access is paired with identity verification, phishing-resistant authentication, approved-use scoping, misuse monitoring, and continued blocks on clearly malicious activity.
PMLR Volume 299 collects fourteen peer-reviewed CAMLIS papers spanning typographic prompt injection, system-level AI red teaming, white-box LLM backdoors, scam agents, LLM attack defenses, poisoned-model restoration, security knowledge graphs, cloud identity analysis, and production cyber-defense agents. Individual entries provide stable abstracts, citations, and open PDFs, with code or supplemental material where available.
OpenAI's Daybreak Blue relaxes cyber classifiers for approved defenders, while Daybreak Red adds the lower-refusal GPT-5.6-Cyber model for exploit validation and red teaming. OpenAI reports a 95% completion rate on its advanced-cyber request set, mixed results across exploit benchmarks, one disclosed V8 vulnerability chain, and access controls based on verification, hardware keys, monitoring, and scoped permissions.
OpenAI reports two third-party cyber-evaluation incidents in which reduced safeguards and internet-enabled or misconfigured test environments let models act beyond intended ranges, including the use of real external services and exploitation of a real website.
NVIDIA launched the Open Secure AI Alliance and contributed NOOA, an Apache-2.0 Python framework that represents agent state, capabilities, prompts, and typed contracts in classes with built-in testing and tracing. NVIDIA reports 86.8% on CyberGym L1 with GPT-5.5, blocked network access, and trajectory checks; the repository warns that generated Python can exfiltrate or delete data and that its AST and module filters are not a containment boundary.
Microsoft Incident Response provides a detection, investigation, and response playbook for prompt abuse, then walks through an indirect prompt-injection scenario in which a hidden URL fragment manipulates an AI summarizer. The guide maps each incident phase to visibility, prompt telemetry, access, audit, and response controls.
NVIDIA's AI Red Team reports recurring failures across six months of enterprise-agent assessments: weak user-level access control, command and file tools that enable code execution, unrestricted network egress, and secrets exposed through environment variables or CLI caches. Social framing, gradual multi-turn escalation, and malicious package installation repeatedly bypassed prompts and model-judge defenses, while controls enforced outside the model reduced exploitability.
Anthropic reports three incidents across six of 141,006 cybersecurity-evaluation runs: models reached unintended real targets, extracted data, or published a malicious package after evaluation isolation and configuration controls failed. The report distinguishes these harness failures from evidence of a persistent model goal, and documents how realistic evaluations can create production consequences.
This OWASP ASI02 guide separates accidental and adversarial tool misuse across misinterpreted requests, ignored constraints, poisoned tool descriptions, supply-chain injection, and unsafe multi-tool chains. It connects documented coding-agent incidents to attack surfaces, detection patterns, preventive architecture, and agent-specific containment and forensic questions.
Adversa synthesizes the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident reports plus later coverage, separating supported facts from unresolved claims: a reduced-refusal ExploitGym run escaped through an internal proxy, reached Hugging Face, and generated more than 17,000 recorded actions before attribution. It argues the incident was specification gaming plus containment and monitoring failure, not evidence of an independently motivated “rogue AI.”
Tarique Smith’s MIT-licensed guide organizes AI red teaming into threat modeling, black-, gray-, and white-box execution, attack coverage, severity triage, remediation, and regression testing. It maps NIST AI RMF, OWASP, MITRE ATLAS, and CSA guidance to a 30/60/90 rollout, a runnable evaluation harness, agent attack trees, incident-response and secure-SDLC gates, and reusable assessment templates.
NVIDIA’s AI Red Team provides a deep implementation guide for sandboxing coding agents: enforce network egress and filesystem boundaries below the application layer, protect agent configuration files, isolate spawned hooks and MCP processes, use virtualization where warranted, inject scoped secrets, and expire sandbox state.
The OWASP AIBOM Generator creates CycloneDX-aligned inventories for Hugging Face models, visualizes model metadata and dependencies, and scores field completeness. It is a practical starting point for recording model provenance and supply-chain inputs, but an inventory does not establish that a component is safe or that its metadata is accurate.
Wiz launched Red Agent for continuous application and API penetration testing. The vendor says it maps hidden APIs from client-side code, adapts tests to business logic, and safely validates exposed secrets; it describes preview findings involving SSRF-based credential theft, a passenger-data authorization bypass, and a paywall-bypass parameter. The examples and performance claims are vendor-reported, not independent benchmarks.