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The paper introduces LAAF, a novel automated red-teaming framework designed to identify Logic-layer Prompt Control Injection (LPCI) vulnerabilities in agentic LLM systems. LAAF combines a comprehensive taxonomy of 49 LPCI techniques with a Persistent Stage Breaker (PSB) that iteratively mutates successful payloads to escalate attacks across multiple stages. Experiments on five production LLM platforms demonstrate LAAF's superior stage-breakthrough efficiency compared to random testing, achieving an 84% mean aggregate breakthrough rate.
Agentic LLMs are surprisingly vulnerable: a new framework finds successful attacks in 84% of attempts by escalating prompt injection techniques across multiple stages.
Agentic LLM systems equipped with persistent memory, RAG pipelines, and external tool connectors face a class of attacks - Logic-layer Prompt Control Injection (LPCI) - for which no automated red-teaming instrument existed. We present LAAF (Logic-layer Automated Attack Framework), the first automated red-teaming framework to combine an LPCI-specific technique taxonomy with stage-sequential seed escalation - two capabilities absent from existing tools: Garak lacks memory-persistence and cross-session triggering; PyRIT supports multi-turn testing but treats turns independently, without seeding each stage from the prior breakthrough. LAAF provides: (i) a 49-technique taxonomy spanning six attack categories (Encoding~11, Structural~8, Semantic~8, Layered~5, Trigger~12, Exfiltration~5; see Table 1), combinable across 5 variants per technique and 6 lifecycle stages, yielding a theoretical maximum of 2,822,400 unique payloads ($49 \times 5 \times 1{,}920 \times 6$; SHA-256 deduplicated at generation time); and (ii) a Persistent Stage Breaker (PSB) that drives payload mutation stage-by-stage: on each breakthrough, the PSB seeds the next stage with a mutated form of the winning payload, mirroring real adversarial escalation. Evaluation on five production LLM platforms across three independent runs demonstrates that LAAF achieves higher stage-breakthrough efficiency than single-technique random testing, with a mean aggregate breakthrough rate of 84\% (range 83--86\%) and platform-level rates stable within 17 percentage points across runs. Layered combinations and semantic reframing are the highest-effectiveness technique categories, with layered payloads outperforming encoding on well-defended platforms.
Amazon Science