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WebSentinel: Detecting and Localizing Prompt Injection Attacks for Web Agents

Authors: Xilong Wang, Yinuo Liu, Zhun Wang, Dawn Song, Neil Gong

Published: 2026-02-03

arXiv ID: 2602.03792v1

Added to Library: 2026-02-04 04:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Prompt injection attacks manipulate webpage content to cause web agents to execute attacker-specified tasks instead of the user's intended ones. Existing methods for detecting and localizing such attacks achieve limited effectiveness, as their underlying assumptions often do not hold in the web-agent setting. In this work, we propose WebSentinel, a two-step approach for detecting and localizing prompt injection attacks in webpages. Given a webpage, Step I extracts \emph{segments of interest} that may be contaminated, and Step II evaluates each segment by checking its consistency with the webpage content as context. We show that WebSentinel is highly effective, substantially outperforming baseline methods across multiple datasets of both contaminated and clean webpages that we collected. Our code is available at: https://github.com/wxl-lxw/WebSentinel.

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