Juanjuan Zhao
Author directory2026
A2M: Trace-Optimized Agent Hijacking in the MCP Ecosystem
Laizhen Li | Xuan Wang | Peicheng Zhao | Juanjuan Zhao | Kejiang Ye | Cheng-zhong Xu | Xitong Gao
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Laizhen Li | Xuan Wang | Peicheng Zhao | Juanjuan Zhao | Kejiang Ye | Cheng-zhong Xu | Xitong Gao
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) rely on semantic matching to select tools from third-party servers, exposing a semantic supply-chain risk through attacker-controlled metadata and outputs. We introduce A2M (Attraction-to-Manipulation), a two-stage black-box framework for hijacking MCP agents. The Attraction phase optimizes tool metadata to increase invocation probability; the Manipulation phase uses execution traces to refine adversarial tool returns that steer agents toward attacker-desired outcomes. On LiveMCPBench, direct attacks optimized and evaluated on GLM-4.6 achieve a macro-average malicious tool invocation rate of 93.6% across four scenarios, increase weighted token costs to 32.4× the benign baseline under Cognitive Denial of Service, and attain a mean attack success rate of 74.4% across Information Exfiltration, Environment Integrity Compromise, and Reasoning Derailment. Transfer to four other models without re-optimization yields corresponding macro-averages of 63.6%, 2.7×, and 24.5%. These findings motivate stronger tool vetting and runtime isolation in MCP ecosystems. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Lilaizhen/A2M.