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BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agents

Authors: Kaiyuan Zhang, Mark Tenenholtz, Kyle Polley, Jerry Ma, Denis Yarats, Ninghui Li

Published: 2025-11-25

arXiv ID: 2511.20597v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-26 04:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into web browsers introduces security challenges that go beyond traditional web application threat models. Prior work has identified prompt injection as a new attack vector for web agents, yet the resulting impact within real-world environments remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we examine the landscape of prompt injection attacks and synthesize a benchmark of attacks embedded in realistic HTML payloads. Our benchmark goes beyond prior work by emphasizing injections that can influence real-world actions rather than mere text outputs, and by presenting attack payloads with complexity and distractor frequency similar to what real-world agents encounter. We leverage this benchmark to conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing defenses, assessing their effectiveness across a suite of frontier AI models. We propose a multi-layered defense strategy comprising both architectural and model-based defenses to protect against evolving prompt injection attacks. Our work offers a blueprint for designing practical, secure web agents through a defense-in-depth approach.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of BrowseSafe-Bench: The paper presents a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating prompt injection defenses specifically designed for AI browser agents, addressing a critical gap in current security measures.
  • Development of a Multi-layered Defense Strategy: The authors propose BrowseSafe, a robust defense mechanism that combines architectural and model-based approaches to protect against elaborate prompt injection attacks.
  • Empirical Evaluation of Existing Models: The paper conducts an extensive empirical evaluation of over 20 AI models against the new benchmark, revealing varying degrees of vulnerability and strengths among existing defenses.
  • Defense-in-depth Approach: The multi-layered defense strategy emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and intervention capabilities, ensuring that AI agents can safely interact with untrusted web content.
  • Insights on Generalization and Performance: The study highlights the model's generalization capabilities to new attack types and strategies, with specific findings on the trade-offs between detection performance and inference latency.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is significant as it addresses the urgent need for enhanced security measures in the emerging field of AI browser agents. The introduction of BrowseSafe-Bench as a practical evaluation tool, alongside the proposed multi-layered defense strategy, provides essential frameworks for understanding and mitigating prompt injection vulnerabilities, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in AI applications. By showcasing the limitations of current defenses and emphasizing the necessity for improved models, this work lays a foundation for future innovations in AI security.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is particularly relevant for AI security researchers due to its focus on the novel threat of prompt injection attacks, which pose unique challenges to the integrity and reliability of conversational AI and autonomous agents. The detailed benchmarks and defense mechanisms proposed provide a valuable resource for further research and development in safeguarding AI systems against sophisticated attacks. Additionally, the empirical results presented in the study foster discussions around model robustness and the efficacy of current security measures, providing a roadmap for future investigations into reliable AI system design.

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