Rethinking Indirect Prompt Injection as a Test-Time Search Problem
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2609.04495 (cs)
[Submitted on 3 Sep 2026]
Title:Rethinking Indirect Prompt Injection as a Test-Time Search Problem
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Abstract:We formulate indirect prompt injection as a test-time search over a task-dependent attack surface induced by the environment, user task, and injection task. To operationalize this formulation, we introduce an agentic attacker with a dedicated search harness that performs environment reconnaissance, structured reasoning over attack strategies, and adaptive evaluation using victim-agent feedback. Across heterogeneous tasks, we find that increasing attacker test-time compute improves vulnerability discovery and exploitation, while ablations show that explicit strategy management is important for avoiding redundant search and sustaining gains at larger budgets. These results suggest that agentic security evaluations should characterize both the attacker's search procedure and compute budget, rather than treating attack success as a budget-independent property of the victim. More broadly, our findings identify the attacker's adaptive search over the system attack surfaces as an important and underexplored security risk for tool-using agents.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.04495 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2609.04495v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04495
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Rethinking Indirect Prompt Injection as a Test-Time Search Problem, by Duong M. Nguyen and 3 other authors
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