Log-To-Leak: Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents via the Model Context Protocol

Summary

LLM agents increasingly access external tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), but the natural-language metadata used to describe those tools creates a prompt-injection surface. Within this established tool-poisoning surface, we study Log-To-Leak, an additive post-hoc logging attack that induces a separate attacker-controlled call after the final legitimate call. Its payload targets the user query, MCP server name, server response, and agent response. We operationalize the injected directive through Trigger, Tool Binding, Justification, and Pressure, and separately measure call success, payload fidelity, and preservation of legitimate behavior. We evaluate five MCP servers and four LLM agents using five metrics spanning effectiveness, utility, and efficiency. Across 18 model-server pairs with valid tool execution, Log-To-Leak achieves an attack success rate (ASR) of 62.64-100% and conditional logging accuracy (LA) of 76.55-95.64%; 16 pairs have absolute target-task completion changes of at most 6.63 percentage points. Three evaluated defenses leave residual ASR above 55% on GitHub MCP with GPT-4o, while an instruction detector flags 85.53% of benign descriptions. These results show that successful task completion can coexist with unauthorized post-hoc disclosure and motivate host-controlled authorization for secondary tool calls.

Tags

• agent-fail:injection-indirect
• agent-cause:adversarial-input