DualView: Preventing Indirect Prompt Injection in Personal AI Agents

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Original abstract

Personal AI agents that run on the user's local machine, such as OpenClaw, automate daily tasks including web search, email, and file management. Their access to computer resources, including the network, file system, and shell, exposes them to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. Prior Dual LLM defenses block IPI by replacing untrusted data with symbols that the agent can reference but not read. However, they track untrusted data only inside the agent's context, so when the agent saves and later rereads untrusted data, that data, possibly an attacker's prompt, can return as trusted data rather than as a symbol, which we call stored IPI. Operating on the user's real environment, which humans and programs share, is what makes agents like OpenClaw practical, and is exactly why a defense that ignores it is incomplete. Preserving symbols in such an environment is hard, because humans and programs need original data. We present DualView, which extends untrusted data tracking from the agent's context to the user's environment, including the file system, shell, network, and other agents, by giving each channel two views. In AgentView, the agent sees untrusted data as symbols even after writing it out and reading it back, blocking stored IPI, while HumanView preserves original data for humans and tools. DualView routes each tool call to the right view and synchronizes data across the two views. DualView deploys as an OpenClaw plugin using only tool hooks, without changing the agent's tool-call logic or tool implementations. Since DualView isolates untrusted data by design, its protection is not limited to known attack templates. In our evaluation on an IPI benchmark and PinchBench, DualView blocked every IPI attack, including stored IPI, while keeping utility close to the unprotected baseline.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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