ClawGuard: Out-of-Band Detection of LLM Agent Workflow Hijacking via EM Side Channel
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866915989434662912 |
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| author | Gan, Leo Linqian Wu, Jeffery Ge, Longyuan Yang, Lanqing Song, Yonghao Zhang, Jingkai Jin, Haojia Wang, Weiyi Xue, Guangtao |
| author_facet | Gan, Leo Linqian Wu, Jeffery Ge, Longyuan Yang, Lanqing Song, Yonghao Zhang, Jingkai Jin, Haojia Wang, Weiyi Xue, Guangtao |
| contents | Autonomous LLM agents face a critical security risk known as workflow hijacking, where attackers subtly alter tool and skill invocations. Existing defenses rely on host-internal telemetry (such as audit logs), which can be forged if the host OS is compromised. To solve this, we introduce ClawGuard, a passive, out-of-band monitor that audits LLM-agent workflows using electromagnetic (EM) emanations. Because distinct agent skills create unique hardware usage patterns (computation, DRAM, network blocking), they emit measurable, macroscopic EM envelopes. External software-defined radios (SDRs) capture these physical signals. Using a drift-aware pipeline with 320-dimensional features, ClawGuard converts RF streams into physical evidence. Evaluated on a 7.82TB RF corpus, ClawGuard achieved an AUC of 0.9945, detecting attacks with a 100% true-positive rate and a 1.16% false-positive rate. This proves passive EM sensing is a practical, forge-resistant physical check against compromised host software. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06205 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | ClawGuard: Out-of-Band Detection of LLM Agent Workflow Hijacking via EM Side Channel Gan, Leo Linqian Wu, Jeffery Ge, Longyuan Yang, Lanqing Song, Yonghao Zhang, Jingkai Jin, Haojia Wang, Weiyi Xue, Guangtao Cryptography and Security Autonomous LLM agents face a critical security risk known as workflow hijacking, where attackers subtly alter tool and skill invocations. Existing defenses rely on host-internal telemetry (such as audit logs), which can be forged if the host OS is compromised. To solve this, we introduce ClawGuard, a passive, out-of-band monitor that audits LLM-agent workflows using electromagnetic (EM) emanations. Because distinct agent skills create unique hardware usage patterns (computation, DRAM, network blocking), they emit measurable, macroscopic EM envelopes. External software-defined radios (SDRs) capture these physical signals. Using a drift-aware pipeline with 320-dimensional features, ClawGuard converts RF streams into physical evidence. Evaluated on a 7.82TB RF corpus, ClawGuard achieved an AUC of 0.9945, detecting attacks with a 100% true-positive rate and a 1.16% false-positive rate. This proves passive EM sensing is a practical, forge-resistant physical check against compromised host software. |
| title | ClawGuard: Out-of-Band Detection of LLM Agent Workflow Hijacking via EM Side Channel |
| topic | Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06205 |