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HFEPX · Eval paper review

From Attack Surface to Defense Architecture: Compositional Security for Agentic Coding Harnesses

Simon Hegelich, Bardh Prenkaj, Habiba Sarhan, Morteza Shahrezaye +4 more

Published

Nov 10, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

17/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Nov 10, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
17/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload. We argue that security in agentic systems is a structural property of the cognitive architecture and permission composition rather than an emergent property of individual models. Static regex blacklists miss structural evasions, whereas LLM-as-a-Judge guardrails incur high latency while over-blocking benign work. We present ActiveSecHarness, a neurosymbolic reference-monitor architecture built around Separation of Intelligence and Authority. It combines (1) Macaroon-inspired HMAC capability tokens across four Trust and Authority Rings, (2) a 2D product taint lattice $\mathcal{L} = \mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{trust}} \times \mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{sens}}$ and a workspace provenance ledger that prevents secret laundering across disk, (3) deterministic Ring-0 OS/tool guards, and (4) bytecode certificates, split-horizon audit logs, self-healing security test synthesis, and an adaptive UserWikiManager. Across $N=252$ fixtures ($120$ attack, $120$ benign, $12$ kill chains), a live local LLM judge (qwen3:4b) refuses $98.3\%$ of benign work at $142.3\,\mathrm{ms}$ latency, whereas Ring 0 achieves $\mathrm{ABR}=1.000$ and $\mathrm{FPR}=0.000$ in $12.7\,μ\mathrm{s}$ ($11{,}200\times$ faster). In a multi-step trajectory ablation, an oracle Conseca-style stateless policy misses $4/12$ kill chains ($\mathrm{ABR}=0.667$) and coarse Boolean taint blocks $83.3\%$ of benign workflows, while our 2D product lattice achieves $\mathrm{ABR}=1.000$ and $\mathrm{FPR}=0.000$ at $\approx 20\,μ\mathrm{s}$ per step.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Llm As Judge

Includes extracted eval setup.

"AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Unit of annotation
Trajectory (inferred)
Expertise required
Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Llm As Judge
Agentic eval
Long Horizon
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use binaries such as bash, curl, and find become the payload.
  • We argue that security in agentic systems is a structural property of the cognitive architecture and permission composition rather than an emergent property of individual models.
  • Static regex blacklists miss structural evasions, whereas LLM-as-a-Judge guardrails incur high latency while over-blocking benign work.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Long-horizon tasks) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • AI coding harnesses couple language models to shells, filesystems, and network sockets, turning the harness into an automated Living-off-the-Land (LotL) platform: once an adversary injects instructions into retrieved content, dual-use…
  • We argue that security in agentic systems is a structural property of the cognitive architecture and permission composition rather than an emergent property of individual models.

Why it matters for eval

  • Static regex blacklists miss structural evasions, whereas LLM-as-a-Judge guardrails incur high latency while over-blocking benign work.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Llm As Judge

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.