A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses
This addresses the security challenges for cybersecurity practitioners and researchers in the emerging field of autonomous agents, but it is incremental as it is a survey rather than a novel method.
The paper tackles the problem of security risks in autonomous LLM-agents by presenting the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring it around applications, threats, and defenses, and providing a comprehensive taxonomy of over 150 papers.
The rapid shift from passive LLMs to autonomous LLM-agents marks a new paradigm in cybersecurity. While these agents can act as powerful tools for both offensive and defensive operations, the very agentic context introduces a new class of inherent security risks. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around three interdependent pillars: Applications, Threats, and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 150 papers, explaining how agents are used, the vulnerabilities they possess, and the countermeasures designed to protect them. A detailed cross-cutting analysis shows emerging trends in agent architecture while revealing critical research gaps in model and modality coverage.