Simple Prompt Injection Attacks Can Leak Personal Data Observed by LLM Agents During Task Execution
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 1, 2025
Abstract
Previous benchmarks on prompt injection in large language models (LLMs) have
primarily focused on generic tasks and attacks, offering limited insights into
more complex threats like data exfiltration. This paper examines how prompt
injection can cause tool-calling agents to leak personal data observed during
task execution. Using a fictitious banking agent, we develop data flow-based
attacks and integrate them into AgentDojo, a recent benchmark for agentic
security. To enhance its scope, we also create a richer synthetic dataset of
human-AI banking conversations. In 16 user tasks from AgentDojo, LLMs show a
15-50 percentage point drop in utility under attack, with average attack
success rates (ASR) around 20 percent; some defenses reduce ASR to zero. Most
LLMs, even when successfully tricked by the attack, avoid leaking highly
sensitive data like passwords, likely due to safety alignments, but they remain
vulnerable to disclosing other personal data. The likelihood of password
leakage increases when a password is requested along with one or two additional
personal details. In an extended evaluation across 48 tasks, the average ASR is
around 15 percent, with no built-in AgentDojo defense fully preventing leakage.
Tasks involving data extraction or authorization workflows, which closely
resemble the structure of exfiltration attacks, exhibit the highest ASRs,
highlighting the interaction between task type, agent performance, and defense
efficacy.