All news with #context window attacks tag

Agent Session Smuggling Threatens Stateful A2A Systems

🔒 Unit42 researchers Jay Chen and Royce Lu describe agent session smuggling, a technique where a malicious AI agent exploits stateful A2A sessions to inject hidden, multi‑turn instructions into a victim agent. By hiding intermediate interactions in session history, an attacker can perform context poisoning, exfiltrate sensitive data, or trigger unauthorized tool actions while presenting only the expected final response to users. The authors present two PoCs (using Google's ADK) showing sensitive information leakage and unauthorized trades, and recommend layered defenses including human‑in‑the‑loop approvals, cryptographic AgentCards, and context‑grounding checks.

What 17,845 GitHub MCP Servers Reveal About Risk and Abuse

🛡️ VirusTotal ran a large-scale audit of 17,845 GitHub projects implementing the MCP (Model Context Protocol) using Code Insight powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash. The automated review initially surfaced an overwhelming number of issues, and a refined prompt focused on intentional malice marked 1,408 repos as likely malicious. Manual checks showed many flagged projects were demos or PoCs, but the analysis still exposed numerous real attack vectors—credential harvesting, remote code execution via exec/subprocess, supply-chain tricks—and recurring insecure practices. The post recommends treating MCP servers like browser extensions: sign and pin versions, sandbox or WASM-isolate them, enforce strict permissions and filter model outputs to remove invisible or malicious content.