Researcher profile

Sahar Abdelnabi

Sahar Abdelnabi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AI Agents May Always Fall for Prompt Injections

Prompt injection is the most critical vulnerability in deployed AI agents. Despite recent progress, we show that the prevailing defense paradigm (data-instruction separation) both fails to detect attacks that operate through contextual manipulation and degrades contextually appropriate behavior. We then recast prompt injection via the lens of Contextual Integrity (CI), a privacy theory that judges information flow compliance with contextual norms. This explains types of attacks that current defenses attempt to patch and predict advanced ones future agents will face. We develop unique benign and attack scenarios that force an agent to violate the norms by (1) misrepresenting the flow, (2) manipulating norms, or (3) mixing multiple flows. This reframing suggests an impossibility result: an adversary can always construct a context under which a blocked flow appears legitimate, or a defender who tightens norms will block genuinely legitimate flows. Our findings suggest that current research addresses a shrinking fraction of future attack surfaces. Instead, through CI, we offer a principled framework for evaluating context-sensitive failures, and designing CI-aware alignment for the frontier autonomous agents.

preprint2026arXiv

Hidden in Memory: Sleeper Memory Poisoning in LLM Agents

Large language models are increasingly augmented with persistent memory, allowing assistants to store user-specific information across sessions for personalization and continuity. This statefulness introduces a new security risk: adversarial content can corrupt what an assistant remembers and thereby influence future interactions. We propose and study sleeper memory poisoning, a delayed attack in which an adversary manipulates external context, such as a document, webpage, or repository, to cause the assistant to store a fabricated memory about the user. Unlike conventional prompt injection, the attack can remain dormant and re-emerge across multiple later conversations. We evaluate the full attack pipeline: whether poisoned memories are written, later retrieved, and ultimately used to steer the following conversations. Across stateful LLM assistants, poisoned memories were added up to 99.8% on GPT-5.5 and 95% on Kimi-K2.6. Crucially, among successful retrievals, poisoned memories cause attacker-intended agentic actions in 60-89% of evaluations across models. These results show that persistent memory can act as a long-term attack surface across multiple future conversations.

preprint2026arXiv

No More, No Less: Task Alignment in Terminal Agents

Terminal agents are increasingly capable of executing complex, long-horizon tasks autonomously from a single user prompt. To do so, they must interpret instructions encountered in the environment (e.g., README files, code comments, stack traces) and determine their relevance to the task. This creates a fundamental challenge: relevant cues must be followed to complete a task, whereas irrelevant or misleading ones must be ignored. Existing benchmarks do not capture this ability. An agent may appear capable by blindly following all instructions, or appear robust by ignoring them altogether. We introduce TAB (Task Alignment Benchmark), a suite of 89 terminal tasks derived from Terminal-Bench 2.1. Each task is intentionally underspecified, with missing information provided as a necessary cue embedded in a natural environmental artifact, alongside a plausible but irrelevant distractor. Solving these tasks requires selectively using the cue while ignoring the distractor. Applying TAB to ten frontier agents reveals a systematic gap between task capability and task alignment. The strongest Terminal-Bench agent achieves high task completion but low task alignment on TAB. Evaluating six prompt-injection defenses further shows that suppressing distractor execution also suppresses the cues required for task completion. These results demonstrate that task-aligned agents require selective use of environmental instructions rather than blanket acceptance or rejection.

preprint2025arXiv

Contextual Integrity in LLMs via Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning

As the era of autonomous agents making decisions on behalf of users unfolds, ensuring contextual integrity (CI) -- what is the appropriate information to share while carrying out a certain task -- becomes a central question to the field. We posit that CI demands a form of reasoning where the agent needs to reason about the context in which it is operating. To test this, we first prompt LLMs to reason explicitly about CI when deciding what information to disclose. We then extend this approach by developing a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that further instills in models the reasoning necessary to achieve CI. Using a synthetic, automatically created, dataset of only $\sim700$ examples but with diverse contexts and information disclosure norms, we show that our method substantially reduces inappropriate information disclosure while maintaining task performance across multiple model sizes and families. Importantly, improvements transfer from this synthetic dataset to established CI benchmarks such as PrivacyLens that has human annotations and evaluates privacy leakage of AI assistants in actions and tool calls. Our code is available at: https://github.com/EricGLan/CI-RL

preprint2022arXiv

Artificial Fingerprinting for Generative Models: Rooting Deepfake Attribution in Training Data

Photorealistic image generation has reached a new level of quality due to the breakthroughs of generative adversarial networks (GANs). Yet, the dark side of such deepfakes, the malicious use of generated media, raises concerns about visual misinformation. While existing research work on deepfake detection demonstrates high accuracy, it is subject to advances in generation techniques and adversarial iterations on detection countermeasure techniques. Thus, we seek a proactive and sustainable solution on deepfake detection, that is agnostic to the evolution of generative models, by introducing artificial fingerprints into the models. Our approach is simple and effective. We first embed artificial fingerprints into training data, then validate a surprising discovery on the transferability of such fingerprints from training data to generative models, which in turn appears in the generated deepfakes. Experiments show that our fingerprinting solution (1) holds for a variety of cutting-edge generative models, (2) leads to a negligible side effect on generation quality, (3) stays robust against image-level and model-level perturbations, (4) stays hard to be detected by adversaries, and (5) converts deepfake detection and attribution into trivial tasks and outperforms the recent state-of-the-art baselines. Our solution closes the responsibility loop between publishing pre-trained generative model inventions and their possible misuses, which makes it independent of the current arms race. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ningyu1991/ArtificialGANFingerprints .

preprint2022arXiv

Open-Domain, Content-based, Multi-modal Fact-checking of Out-of-Context Images via Online Resources

Misinformation is now a major problem due to its potential high risks to our core democratic and societal values and orders. Out-of-context misinformation is one of the easiest and effective ways used by adversaries to spread viral false stories. In this threat, a real image is re-purposed to support other narratives by misrepresenting its context and/or elements. The internet is being used as the go-to way to verify information using different sources and modalities. Our goal is an inspectable method that automates this time-consuming and reasoning-intensive process by fact-checking the image-caption pairing using Web evidence. To integrate evidence and cues from both modalities, we introduce the concept of 'multi-modal cycle-consistency check'; starting from the image/caption, we gather textual/visual evidence, which will be compared against the other paired caption/image, respectively. Moreover, we propose a novel architecture, Consistency-Checking Network (CCN), that mimics the layered human reasoning across the same and different modalities: the caption vs. textual evidence, the image vs. visual evidence, and the image vs. caption. Our work offers the first step and benchmark for open-domain, content-based, multi-modal fact-checking, and significantly outperforms previous baselines that did not leverage external evidence.

preprint2021arXiv

"What's in the box?!": Deflecting Adversarial Attacks by Randomly Deploying Adversarially-Disjoint Models

Machine learning models are now widely deployed in real-world applications. However, the existence of adversarial examples has been long considered a real threat to such models. While numerous defenses aiming to improve the robustness have been proposed, many have been shown ineffective. As these vulnerabilities are still nowhere near being eliminated, we propose an alternative deployment-based defense paradigm that goes beyond the traditional white-box and black-box threat models. Instead of training a single partially-robust model, one could train a set of same-functionality, yet, adversarially-disjoint models with minimal in-between attack transferability. These models could then be randomly and individually deployed, such that accessing one of them minimally affects the others. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and a wide range of attacks show that we achieve a significantly lower attack transferability across our disjoint models compared to a baseline of ensemble diversity. In addition, compared to an adversarially trained set, we achieve a higher average robust accuracy while maintaining the accuracy of clean examples.

preprint2020arXiv

VisualPhishNet: Zero-Day Phishing Website Detection by Visual Similarity

Phishing websites are still a major threat in today's Internet ecosystem. Despite numerous previous efforts, similarity-based detection methods do not offer sufficient protection for the trusted websites - in particular against unseen phishing pages. This paper contributes VisualPhishNet, a new similarity-based phishing detection framework, based on a triplet Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). VisualPhishNet learns profiles for websites in order to detect phishing websites by a similarity metric that can generalize to pages with new visual appearances. We furthermore present VisualPhish, the largest dataset to date that facilitates visual phishing detection in an ecologically valid manner. We show that our method outperforms previous visual similarity phishing detection approaches by a large margin while being robust against a range of evasion attacks.