aisecurity.ninja

AgentDrift: A Step-Labeled Benchmark of Injection-Hijacked LLM Agent Trajectories

Asif Pinjari, Mithun Paul Saint-Germain

Published Sep 7, 2026 · arXiv:2609.06972

cs.CRcs.AIcs.LG

AgentDrift is a synthetic benchmark for detecting indirect prompt-injection hijacking in LLM-agent tool-call traces, with 12,536 trajectories across five domains and step-level labels marking benign behavior, injection points, successful hijack steps, and failed injections. What makes it useful is the fine-grained temporal labeling and the inclusion of failed attacks and hard negatives that force models to distinguish “attack present” from “agent actually compromised,” though its main caveat is that the data is synthetic, generated mostly from a single open model, and shows artifacts like template concentration, collapsed attack-goal diversity, and world-identity leakage.

Abstract

LLM agents complete tasks by issuing sequences of tool calls, and every observation they read is a channel through which an indirect prompt injection can enter. A successful injection has a characteristic shape when the trajectory is read in order: a benign prefix gives way to actions that serve the attacker rather than the user. Existing benchmarks measure whether such attacks succeed against live agents, and existing guard models judge a trace as a whole; no public corpus labels, step by step, where an injection enters a trajectory and which steps it corrupts. We present AgentDrift, a benchmark of 12,536 synthetic tool-call trajectories over five agent domains in which every one of the 71,024 steps carries one of four labels: benign, injection point, hijacked, or failed injection. The corpus contains 4,000 benign, 5,536 attacked, 1,500 failed-attack, and 1,500 hard-negative trajectories; attacked trajectories follow three compliance patterns whose label strings obey a stated regular grammar. Failed attacks carry an injection the agent resisted, and hard negatives carry legitimate content that resembles an attack, so a detector must separate attempt from success and deviation from novelty. Trajectories were generated by a single open model under category-specific protocols, enforced by a closed-vocabulary structural validator, screened by an LLM judge, and audited by hand on 1,200 trajectories; we show that the LLM judge was itself fooled by the hard negatives. A surface-feature logistic regression recovers only 55.4% of attacks (F1 0.647), including only 8.2% of partial hijacks and 23.1% of delayed executions, so nearly half of the attacks require modeling the behavioral sequence. We measure template concentration, attack-goal-family collapse, and world-identity leakage in the generated data, and release the corpus with its documentation under CC BY 4.0.