ToolFlood: Beyond Selection -- Hiding Valid Tools from LLM Agents via Semantic Covering

TL;DR

ToolFlood is a novel attack that overwhelms LLM tool retrieval systems by injecting semantically covering malicious tools, significantly disrupting the selection process with minimal injection effort.

Contribution

This paper introduces ToolFlood, a new adversarial attack method that exploits embedding space geometry to dominate tool retrieval in LLM agents, highlighting robustness vulnerabilities.

Findings

Achieves up to 95% attack success rate on benchmarks

Effective with as low as 1% injection rate

Theoretically analyzes retrieval saturation effects

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly use external tools for complex tasks and rely on embedding-based retrieval to select a small top-k subset for reasoning. As these systems scale, the robustness of this retrieval stage is underexplored, even though prior work has examined attacks on tool selection. This paper introduces ToolFlood, a retrieval-layer attack on tool-augmented LLM agents. Rather than altering which tool is chosen after retrieval, ToolFlood overwhelms retrieval itself by injecting a few attacker-controlled tools whose metadata is carefully placed by exploiting the geometry of embedding space. These tools semantically span many user queries, dominate the top-k results, and push all benign tools out of the agent's context. ToolFlood uses a two-phase adversarial tool generation strategy. It first samples subsets of target queries and uses an LLM to iteratively generate diverse tool names and descriptions. It then runs an iterative greedy selection that chooses tools maximizing coverage of remaining queries in embedding space under a cosine-distance threshold, stopping when all queries are covered or a budget is reached. We provide theoretical analysis of retrieval saturation and show on standard benchmarks that ToolFlood achieves up to a 95% attack success rate with a low injection rate (1% in ToolBench). The code will be made publicly available at the following link: https://github.com/as1-prog/ToolFlood