BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agents

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhang, Kaiyuan, Tenenholtz, Mark, Polley, Kyle, Ma, Jerry, Yarats, Denis, Li, Ninghui
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912729050120192
author Zhang, Kaiyuan
Tenenholtz, Mark
Polley, Kyle
Ma, Jerry
Yarats, Denis
Li, Ninghui
author_facet Zhang, Kaiyuan
Tenenholtz, Mark
Polley, Kyle
Ma, Jerry
Yarats, Denis
Li, Ninghui
contents The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into web browsers introduces security challenges that go beyond traditional web application threat models. Prior work has identified prompt injection as a new attack vector for web agents, yet the resulting impact within real-world environments remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we examine the landscape of prompt injection attacks and synthesize a benchmark of attacks embedded in realistic HTML payloads. Our benchmark goes beyond prior work by emphasizing injections that can influence real-world actions rather than mere text outputs, and by presenting attack payloads with complexity and distractor frequency similar to what real-world agents encounter. We leverage this benchmark to conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing defenses, assessing their effectiveness across a suite of frontier AI models. We propose a multi-layered defense strategy comprising both architectural and model-based defenses to protect against evolving prompt injection attacks. Our work offers a blueprint for designing practical, secure web agents through a defense-in-depth approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20597
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agents
Zhang, Kaiyuan
Tenenholtz, Mark
Polley, Kyle
Ma, Jerry
Yarats, Denis
Li, Ninghui
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into web browsers introduces security challenges that go beyond traditional web application threat models. Prior work has identified prompt injection as a new attack vector for web agents, yet the resulting impact within real-world environments remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we examine the landscape of prompt injection attacks and synthesize a benchmark of attacks embedded in realistic HTML payloads. Our benchmark goes beyond prior work by emphasizing injections that can influence real-world actions rather than mere text outputs, and by presenting attack payloads with complexity and distractor frequency similar to what real-world agents encounter. We leverage this benchmark to conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing defenses, assessing their effectiveness across a suite of frontier AI models. We propose a multi-layered defense strategy comprising both architectural and model-based defenses to protect against evolving prompt injection attacks. Our work offers a blueprint for designing practical, secure web agents through a defense-in-depth approach.
title BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agents
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20597