Harold Triedman

Rishi Jha, Harold Triedman, Justin Wagle et al.

Control-flow hijacking attacks manipulate orchestration mechanisms in multi-agent systems into performing unsafe actions that compromise the system and exfiltrate sensitive information. Recently proposed defenses, such as LlamaFirewall, rely on alignment checks of inter-agent communications to ensure that all agent invocations are "related to" and "likely to further" the original objective. We start by demonstrating control-flow hijacking attacks that evade these defenses even if alignment checks are performed by advanced LLMs. We argue that the safety and functionality objectives of multi-agent systems fundamentally conflict with each other. This conflict is exacerbated by the brittle definitions of "alignment" and the checkers' incomplete visibility into the execution context. We then propose, implement, and evaluate ControlValve, a new defense inspired by the principles of control-flow integrity and least privilege. ControlValve (1) generates permitted control-flow graphs for multi-agent systems, and (2) enforces that all executions comply with these graphs, along with contextual rules (generated in a zero-shot manner) for each agent invocation.

Harold Triedman, Vitaly Shmatikov

Large language models equipped with Web search, information retrieval tools, and other agentic capabilities are beginning to supplant traditional search engines. As users start to rely on LLMs for information on many topics, including controversial and debatable issues, it is important to understand how the stances and opinions expressed in LLM outputs are influenced by the documents they use as their information sources. In this paper, we present MillStone, the first benchmark that aims to systematically measure the effect of external arguments on the stances that LLMs take on controversial issues (not all of them political). We apply MillStone to nine leading LLMs and measure how ``open-minded'' they are to arguments supporting opposite sides of these issues, whether different LLMs agree with each other, which arguments LLMs find most persuasive, and whether these arguments are the same for different LLMs. In general, we find that LLMs are open-minded on most issues. An authoritative source of information can easily sway an LLM's stance, highlighting the importance of source selection and the risk that LLM-based information retrieval and search systems can be manipulated.