AgentDyn: Are Your Agent Security Defenses Deployable in Real-World Dynamic Environments?

TL;DR

AgentDyn is a new benchmark with 60 dynamic, open-ended tasks designed to evaluate agent security defenses in realistic environments, revealing current defenses' limitations.

Contribution

This work introduces AgentDyn, a comprehensive benchmark with dynamic tasks and helpful instructions, addressing flaws in existing static agent security benchmarks.

Findings

Most existing defenses are insecure or over-conservative.

Current benchmarks do not reflect real-world dynamic environments.

AgentDyn exposes weaknesses in state-of-the-art defenses.

Abstract

AI agents that autonomously interact with external tools and environments have shown great promise across real-world applications. However, their reliance on external data exposes them to serious indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in third-party content hijack agent behaviors. To mitigate this threat, a growing number of defenses have been proposed and evaluated under existing agent security benchmarks. These benchmarks provide structured environments for comparing attacks and defenses, and have become a key driver for defense design and optimization. However, as agents move toward more complex and open-ended real-world deployments, there is a pressing need for benchmarks to become more adaptive and better reflect the dynamic environments faced by real-world agentic systems. In this work, we reveal three fundamental flaws in the current benchmarks and push the frontier along these dimensions: (i) lack of dynamic open-ended tasks, (ii) lack of helpful instructions, and (iii) simplistic user tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentDyn, a manually designed benchmark featuring 60 challenging open-ended tasks and 560 injection test cases across Shopping, GitHub, and Daily Life. Unlike prior static benchmarks, AgentDyn requires dynamic planning and incorporates helpful third-party instructions. Our evaluation of ten state-of-the-art defenses suggests that almost all existing defenses are either not secure enough or suffer from significant over-defense, revealing that existing defenses are still far from real-world deployment. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/leolee99/AgentDyn.