Agent establishes persistence
ID |
agent-establishes-persistence |
Severity |
high |
Remediation Complexity |
medium |
Remediation Risk |
low |
Remediation Effort |
medium |
OWASP LLM |
LLM06:2025 — Excessive Agency |
OWASP ASI |
ASI10:2026 (secondary ASI05:2026) |
OWASP AST |
AST01:2026 |
Family |
LLM06 — Excessive Agency |
Red-team vectors |
Sandbox Escape / RCE |
Tags |
ai_security |
Description
Agent or skill code installs itself into a startup or scheduled mechanism — crontab, a systemd unit, launchd, a Windows Run key, a shell rc file, or a scheduled task — so it keeps running or re-runs outside the intended session. This is the SkillSpector rogue-agent persistence class (RA1) and the native core of ASI10 (Rogue Agents).
Phase-1 ships the AST fallback (a direct write to a persistence mechanism) at reduced confidence; the Phase-1.5 TaintFlowDetector upgrades it to flow-confirmed. The detector is scoped to agent/skill artefacts, so a legitimate installer script registering a service elsewhere produces no finding. The prose variant (a skill instructing the agent to persist) is covered by skill-instruction-surface + the semantic stage.