Agent Security is a Systems Problem

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 18 May 2026] Agent Security is a Systems Problem Mihai Christodorescu, Earlence Fernandes, Ashish Hooda, Somesh Jha, Johann Rehberger, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Xiaohan Fu, Khawaja Shams, Guy Amir, Jihye Choi, Sarthak Choudhary, Nils Palumbo, Andrey Labunets, Nishit V. Pandya We take the position that agent security must be approached as a systems problem: the AI model powering the agent must be treated as an untrusted component, and security invariants must be enforced at the system level. Through this lens, efforts to increase model robustness (the dominant viewpoint in the community) are insufficient on their own. Instead, we must complement existing efforts with techniques from the systems security domain. Based on our experience as cybersecurity researchers in operating systems, networks, formal methods, and adversarial machine learning, we articulate a set of core principles, grounded in decades of systems security research, that provide a foundation for designing agentic systems with predictable guarantees. As evidence, we analyze eleven representative real-world attacks on agents and discuss how systems principles, if realized, could have prevented these attacks. We also identify the research challenges that stand in the way of implementing these principles in agents. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.18991 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.18991v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.18991 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Nils Palumbo [view email] [v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 18:11:17 UTC (9,744 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)