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Tianyu Du

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#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning

Coding agents are increasingly used for software engineering tasks, including bootstrapping projects from third-party repositories whose integrity cannot be assumed. Prior work on repository poisoning largely focuses on attacker-controlled injection and disguise, but developers also shape risk through everyday invocation choices: what task to delegate, how to phrase the request, and which skills or rules to supply. We term these user-side choices Prompt-Level Configurations (PLCs) and introduce CIPR (Coding In Poisoned Repos), the first benchmark that systematically varies PLCs in poisoned real-world repositories. CIPR comprises 1,920 instances across 20 repositories, four task types, three social-media-grounded prompt styles, and three skill/rule conditions, and measures attack success rate (ASR) and agent alert rate (AR) using automated runtime and trace-based oracles. Our evaluation reveals two key insights: (1) Vulnerability is highly context-dependent, with task type creating up to a 4.5-fold difference in ASR, with test-execution task forming a silent attack surface (high ASR, low AR). (2) Prompt expression shifts risk indirectly: underspecified prompts reduce ASR by truncating execution depth; noisy prompts exhibit a directional trend toward suppressing alerts by making malicious content less conspicuous. These findings highlight that coding agent vulnerability is not a static property, but a dynamic outcome shaped by everyday user configurations.

Fu-Kang Zhu, Binbin Zhao, Ruixiao Lin et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond Over-Refusal: Defending Indirect Prompt Injection via Latent Instruction Manifolds

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been integrated into complex ecosystems (e.g., Code Agents), while Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks have emerged as critical barriers to their safe deployment. Attackers exploit LLMs'indistinguishability between"instructions"and"data"to manipulate LLMs via maliciously injected instructions. Existing defenses, however, face an intractable safety-utility trade-off: most guardrails either incur high latency or suffer from severe over-refusal. In this paper, we first demonstrate that LLMs can separate instruction from data intrinsically with both theoretical and empirical evidence. Inspired by this insight, we propose AEGIS (Adaptive Ensemble Guard for Injection Shielding). AEGIS extracts instruction-sensitive projectors to identify malicious instructions and leverages a Unified Multi-Layer Consensus mechanism that aggregates topologically distinct signals across the network depth. Empirical evaluations show that AEGIS achieves remarkable detection performance against both heuristic and optimization-based attacks compared to baselines, highlighting its potential to mitigate IPI. Code is available at https://github.com/xaddwell/AEGIS

Jiahao Chen, Ruiping Yin, Xinfeng Li et al. · 0 citations
Book Open access Aug 2026

The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Adversarial Misclassification of Safe Inputs as Unsafe in Multimodal Guardrails

Unsafe Semantic Distillation is proposed, which aligns adversarial perturbations with distributional representations of unsafe content rather than prompt-specific instances, and achieves 84% attack success rates, outperforming existing methods and exposing fundamental vulnerabilities in current multimodal safety architectures.

Shuo Shi, Ruiping Yin, Naen Xu et al. · 1 citation