Blocking at the Boundary: Auditing Long-Horizon Agents against Staged Prompt Injection

Jingkai Liu, Yufei Han, Xiaoting Lyu, Wei Wang, Ting Yu

Long-horizon agents consume external content, invoke tools, and modify persistent state. Indirect prompt injection can exploit task-specific context, propagate across causally connected stages, and alter a consequential action while the workflow continues; we term this staged prompt injection. We build an automated, feedback-guided attack generation pipeline and apply it to Claude Code and Codex in their native runtimes. The confirmed attacks span eight workflow scenarios, seven attack goals, and six injection surfaces, showing that production agents are vulnerable to context-aware, multi-step injection over long horizons. Stopping such attacks requires a decision before each consequential action: input screening and completed-run evaluation cannot locate the intervention point, and existing pre-action methods use incompatible units and labels. We therefore formulate boundary action auditing: given initial context, a trajectory prefix, and a fully specified pending message or tool call, an auditor predicts Pass or Block before its effect occurs. Pairing attacked and benign executions yields a 479-pair, 3,112-unit benchmark. We further propose Path-Aligned Attribution (PAA), a…