Yinzhi Cao

Author directory

2026

Command-line interface (CLI) agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can interpret natural-language requests, plan multi-step tasks, execute shell commands, and modify files and system state. As these agents are increasingly used for operating-system (OS) workflows, it is important to evaluate whether they can be misused to carry out security-relevant operations. Existing benchmarks often lack an attacker-knowledge model grounded in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), provide limited coverage of end-to-end kill chains, rely on simplified single-host environments, or use LLM-as-a-judge for success evaluation. We introduce ADVCLI, an MITRE ATT CK-aligned benchmark for evaluating OS-level misuse risks of CLI agents in a controlled multi-host sandbox. ADVCLI contains 140 tasks: 40 direct malicious requests, 74 TTP-based tasks, and 26 end-to-end kill chains. Each task is paired with deterministic hard-coded verification protocols that check whether the requested OS-level effect is realized. We evaluate seven CLI Agents and products built on nine foundation models, including ReAct, OpenClaw, OpenAI Agent SDK, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor CLI, and Cursor IDE. Results show that current CLI frequently proceed beyond refusal and can complete a non-negligible fraction of malicious OS-level tasks, especially when requests include TTP-style attacker knowledge. ADVCLI provides a reproducible testbed for evaluating these risks and for developing stronger safety mechanisms for tool-using CLI agents in the future.
Text-to-Image models may generate harmful content, such as pornographic images, particularly when unsafe prompts are submitted. To address this issue, safety filters are often added on top of text-to-image models, or the models themselves are aligned to reduce harmful outputs. However, these defenses remain vulnerable when an attacker strategically designs adversarial prompts to bypass these safety guardrails. In this work, we propose PromptTune, a method to jailbreak text-to-image models with safety guardrails using a fine-tuned large language model. Unlike other query-based jailbreak attacks that require repeated queries to the target model, our attack generates adversarial prompts efficiently after fine-tuning our AttackLLM. We evaluate our method on three datasets of unsafe prompts and against five safety guardrails. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively bypasses safety guardrails, outperforms existing no-box attacks, and also facilitates other query-based attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengyuan-jiang/PromptTune.
Training models on a carefully chosen portion of data rather than the full dataset is now a standard preprocess for modern ML. From vision coreset selection to large-scale filtering in language models, it enables scalability with minimal utility loss. A common intuition is that training on fewer samples should also reduce privacy risks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. We show that subset training is not privacy free: the very choices of which data are included or excluded can introduce new privacy surface and leak more sensitive information. Such information can be captured by adversaries either through side-channel metadata from the subset selection process or via the outputs of the target model. To systematically study this phenomenon, we propose CoLA (Choice Leakage Attack), a unified framework for analyzing privacy leakage in subset selection. In CoLA, depending on the adversary’s knowledge of the side-channel information, we define two practical attack scenarios: Subset-aware Side-channel Attacks and Black-box Attacks. Under both scenarios, we investigate two privacy surfaces unique to subset training: (1) Training-membership MIA (TM-MIA), which concerns only the privacy of training data membership, and (2) Selection-participation MIA (SP-MIA), which concerns the privacy of all samples that participated in the subset selection process. Notably, SP-MIA enlarges the notion of membership from model training to the entire data-model supply chain. Experiments on vision and language models show that existing threat models underestimate subset-training privacy risks: the expanded privacy surface leaks both training and selection membership, extending risks from individual models to the broader ML ecosystem.

2024