Sahar Abdelnabi

Author directory

2026

Indirect prompt injection attacks exploit a fundamental weakness of LLMs: executing unauthorized tasks from untrusted sources. Despite the practical significance of this attack vector, existing benchmarks rely on small sets of template-based attacks (100–1,000 examples) that fail to capture the diversity and adaptiveness of real-world adversaries. Consequently, benchmarks are saturated and overfit to static attacks. We introduce LLMail-Inject, a large-scale benchmark of 208,095 distinct human-written attack prompts collected through a public red-teaming challenge with 839 participants. LLMail-Inject evaluates the attack’s complete chain of execution: prompts must be retrieved from an email database, evade production-level defenses, and trigger unauthorized tool calls with correct arguments. Evaluation reveals that models that achieve <5% attack success rate (ASR) on existing benchmarks fail more on LLMail-Inject: Meta SecAlign–specifically trained against prompt injection–still yields 32% ASR, GPT-4o exhibits 58% ASR, and GPT-5 mini 47% ASR. We further demonstrate that attacks transfer across domains, achieving 37% ASR on proof-of-concept coding tasks and 28-45% ASR on file management tasks. We release our challenge platform and curated evaluation subsets at multiple difficulty tiers and the full dataset with rich annotations.
As language models evolve into autonomous agents that act and communicate on behalf of users, ensuring safety in multi-agent ecosystems becomes a central challenge. Interactions between personal assistants and external service providers expose a core tension between utility and protection: effective collaboration requires information sharing, yet every exchange creates new attack surfaces. We introduce ConVerse, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating privacy and security risks in agent–agent interactions. ConVerse spans three practical domains (travel, real estate, insurance) with 12 user personas and over 864 contextually grounded attacks (611 privacy, 253 security). Unlike prior single-agent settings, it models autonomous, multi-turn agent-to-agent conversations where malicious requests are embedded within plausible discourse. Privacy is tested through a three-tier taxonomy assessing abstraction quality, while security attacks target tool use and preference manipulation. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art models reveals persistent vulnerabilities—privacy attacks succeed in up to 88% of cases and security breaches in up to 60%—with stronger models leaking more. By unifying privacy and security within interactive multi-agent contexts, ConVerse reframes safety as an emergent property of communication.

2025

Scientific discovery catalyzes human intellectual advances, driven by the cycle of hypothesis generation, experimental design, evaluation, and assumption refinement. Central to this process is causal inference, uncovering the mechanisms behind observed phenomena. While randomized experiments provide strong inferences, they are often infeasible due to ethical or practical constraints. However, observational studies are prone to confounding or mediating biases. While crucial, identifying such backdoor paths is expensive and heavily depends on scientists’ domain knowledge to generate hypotheses. We introduce a novel benchmark where the objective is to complete a partial causal graph. We design a benchmark with varying difficulty levels with over 4000 queries. We show the strong ability of LLMs to hypothesize the backdoor variables between a cause and its effect. Unlike simple knowledge memorization of fixed associations, our task requires the LLM to reason according to the context of the entire graph.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in autonomous decision-making, where they sample options from vast action spaces. However, the heuristics that guide this sampling process remain under-explored. We study this sampling behavior and show that this underlying heuristics resembles that of human decision-making: comprising a descriptive component (reflecting statistical norm) and a prescriptive component (implicit ideal encoded in the LLM) of a concept. We show that this deviation of a sample from the statistical norm towards a prescriptive component consistently appears in concepts across diverse real-world domains like public health, and economic trends. To further illustrate the theory, we demonstrate that concept prototypes in LLMs are affected by prescriptive norms, similar to the concept of normality in humans. Through case studies and comparison with human studies, we illustrate that in real-world applications, the shift of samples toward an ideal value in LLMs’ outputs can result in significantly biased decision-making, raising ethical concerns.