StruPhantom: Evolutionary Injection Attacks on Black-Box Tabular Agents Powered by Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Feng, Yang, Pan, Xudong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
author_facet Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
contents The proliferation of autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized popular business applications dealing with tabular data, i.e., tabular agents. Although LLMs are observed to be vulnerable against prompt injection attacks from external data sources, tabular agents impose strict data formats and predefined rules on the attacker's payload, which are ineffective unless the agent navigates multiple layers of structural data to incorporate the payload. To address the challenge, we present a novel attack termed StruPhantom which specifically targets black-box LLM-powered tabular agents. Our attack designs an evolutionary optimization procedure which continually refines attack payloads via the proposed constrained Monte Carlo Tree Search augmented by an off-topic evaluator. StruPhantom helps systematically explore and exploit the weaknesses of target applications to achieve goal hijacking. Our evaluation validates the effectiveness of StruPhantom across various LLM-based agents, including those on real-world platforms, and attack scenarios. Our attack achieves over 50% higher success rates than baselines in enforcing the application's response to contain phishing links or malicious codes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle StruPhantom: Evolutionary Injection Attacks on Black-Box Tabular Agents Powered by Large Language Models
Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
The proliferation of autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized popular business applications dealing with tabular data, i.e., tabular agents. Although LLMs are observed to be vulnerable against prompt injection attacks from external data sources, tabular agents impose strict data formats and predefined rules on the attacker's payload, which are ineffective unless the agent navigates multiple layers of structural data to incorporate the payload. To address the challenge, we present a novel attack termed StruPhantom which specifically targets black-box LLM-powered tabular agents. Our attack designs an evolutionary optimization procedure which continually refines attack payloads via the proposed constrained Monte Carlo Tree Search augmented by an off-topic evaluator. StruPhantom helps systematically explore and exploit the weaknesses of target applications to achieve goal hijacking. Our evaluation validates the effectiveness of StruPhantom across various LLM-based agents, including those on real-world platforms, and attack scenarios. Our attack achieves over 50% higher success rates than baselines in enforcing the application's response to contain phishing links or malicious codes.
title StruPhantom: Evolutionary Injection Attacks on Black-Box Tabular Agents Powered by Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09841