MCP-ITP: An Automated Framework for Implicit Tool Poisoning in MCP
To standardize interactions between LLM-based agents and their environments, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) was proposed and has since been widely adopted. However, integrating external tools expands the attack surface, exposing agents to tool poisoning attacks. In such attacks, malicious instructions embedded in tool metadata are injected into the agent context during MCP registration phase, thereby manipulating agent behavior. Prior work primarily focuses on explicit tool poisoning or relied on manually crafted poisoned tools. In contrast, we focus on a particularly stealthy variant: implicit tool poisoning, where the poisoned tool itself remains uninvoked. Instead, the instructions embedded in the tool metadata induce the agent to invoke a legitimate but high-privilege tool to perform malicious operations. We propose MCP-ITP, the first automated and adaptive framework for implicit tool poisoning within the MCP ecosystem. MCP-ITP formulates poisoned tool generation as a black-box optimization problem and employs an iterative optimization strategy that leverages feedback from both an evaluation LLM and a detection LLM to maximize Attack Success Rate (ASR) while evading current detection mechanisms. Experimental results on the MCPTox dataset across 12 LLM agents demonstrate that MCP-ITP consistently outperforms the manually crafted baseline, achieving up to 84.2% ASR while suppressing the Malicious Tool Detection Rate (MDR) to as low as 0.3%.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ShareLock: A Stealthy Multi-Tool Threshold Poisoning Attack Against MCP
With the rapid evolution of LLM-driven agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol bridging LLMs with external tools, has quickly become foundational to modern agent ecosystems. However, the expanding adoption…
Automatic Red Teaming LLM-based Agents with Model Context Protocol Tools
The remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) has led to the wide application of LLM-based agents in various domains. To standardize interactions between LLM-based agents and their environments, model context…
Red TeamingImplicit Poisoning Attacks in Two-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Adversarial Policies for Training-Time Attacks
In targeted poisoning attacks, an attacker manipulates an agent-environment interaction to force the agent into adopting a policy of interest, called target policy. Prior work has primarily focused on attacks that modify…
Poisoning the Search Space in Neural Architecture Search
Deep learning has proven to be a highly effective problem-solving tool for object detection and image segmentation across various domains such as healthcare and autonomous driving. At the heart of this performance lies n…
Autonomous DrivingImage SegmentationNeural Architecture Searchobject-detection+2Manipulating Machine Learning: Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures for Regression Learning
As machine learning becomes widely used for automated decisions, attackers have strong incentives to manipulate the results and models generated by machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we perform the first systema…
BIG-bench Machine Learningregression