Kairos: Transactional Security Enforcement at the System Boundary for LLM Agents

Kristoffer Hempel, Nils Loose, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Thomas Eisenbarth

Large language model (LLM) agents are becoming an integral part of the software development lifecycle, and the capabilities granted to them allow an agent to act with the user's authority on any resource it can access. The reach that gives an agent its utility is equally available to an attacker who can steer it. Anything an agent ingests can carry an injected instruction, and since the model does not reliably distinguish instructions from data, indirect prompt injection should be mitigated by mediating the effects the agent produces. Such mediation faces a structural difficulty. Legitimate work and the first step of an attack often look alike when an individual action is observed, and what separates them lies later in the trace, so a monitor limited to allow and deny is forced to decide before the evidence accumulates. We present Kairos, a reference monitor at the isolation boundary of an unmodified, opaque agent, where a tool call, a shell command, and a script the agent writes all cross the boundary as the same file and network operations, so that confinement holds regardless of the agent's behavior. A declarative policy that states which sources are trusted decides most…