A new framework, Mantis, lets cybersecurity professionals automate counter-offensive actions against any AI agents attacking their systems. The new op

“Mantis Framework" poisons, traps hackers' AI agents in a tarpit

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-04 18:30:08

A new framework, Mantis, lets cybersecurity professionals automate counter-offensive actions against any AI agents attacking their systems.

The new open-source toolkit shows how defenders can use prompt injection attacks to take over systems hosting a malicious agent.

Alternatively, they can soak up attackers' AI resources in an “agent tarpit” that traps the LLM agent in an infinite filesystem exploration loop*.

The Mantis** framework is the creation of three Red Team security researchers and academics associated with George Mason University.

It effectively generates honeypots or decoys designed to counter-attack LLM agents activated against them, using various prompt injections.

Dario Pasquini, Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos, and Giuseppe Ateniese say once deployed, Mantis “operates autonomously, orchestrating countermeasures…through a suite of decoy services…such as fake FTP servers and compromised-looking web applications [to] entrap LLM agents by mimicking exploitable features and common attack vectors.

It can then counter-attack, with "prompt injection[s] inserted in…a way that [is] invisible to a human operator that loads the decoy’s response. We achieve this by using ANSI escape sequences and HTML comment tags.”