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A Blind Trust, the Bloody Thrust: When Attacker-Controlled Hook Updates Steer AI Agent Harnesses towards Malicious Behaviors

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 3, 2026 · UTC

Modern AI agent harnesses expose lifecycle hooks that bind shell commands to runtime events such as session start, tool calls, and file edits. These commands run with host privileges yet ship as lifecycle-hook configuration and may fire at times the LLM never observes. We identify the lifecycle-hook update path, which harnesses trust blindly, as a new attack surface. Under a supply-chain threat model in which an attacker controls only plugin metadata and lifecycle-hook configuration, a benign versioned plugin can be trojanized by an update that silently binds attacker-chosen commands to benign

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