OWASP LLM Top 10: ExcessiveAgency Feedback


# LLM08_ExcessiveAgency_Feedback.md

### Strengths

1. **Clarity in Explanation**: The entry does a great job of clearly defining "Excessive Agency" and its associated risks. The tone is professional and easy to follow, which is important for a technical audience.
   
2. **Effective Use of Examples**: The section on common vulnerability examples and attack scenarios is well-developed, providing readers with relevant, practical contexts. Each example is clearly linked to the overarching concept of "Excessive Agency."

3. **Logical Flow**: The overall structure adheres well to the OWASP format, with clear sections for Description, Common Examples, and Mitigation Strategies. The flow of information feels logical and cohesive.

4. **Technical Depth**: Without going overboard, the draft maintains a good balance of depth, giving enough context for someone with a technical background to understand how this vulnerability operates.

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### Areas for Improvement

1. **Conciseness**: Some of the sentences are quite long and could be more concise. For instance, reducing wordiness can make the text more digestible, especially for readers quickly scanning.

2. **Ambiguity in Terminology**: The phrase "excessive agency" is used frequently, but it might be helpful to clarify the concept earlier with more precision. Terms like “malfunction” and “triggers” could be better defined or rephrased to avoid vagueness.

3. **Repetitive Sentence Structures**: The entry often repeats similar sentence structures, which can detract from the overall readability. Varying sentence length and format would enhance engagement.

4. **Bullet Points and Lists**: While some lists are well done, other sections would benefit from converting long paragraphs into bullet points or concise numbered lists. For example, the list of root causes under "Excessive Agency" could be reformatted for easier scanning.

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### Specific Suggestions for Enhancement

1. **Rephrasing for Conciseness**: 
   - Original: “Excessive Agency is the vulnerability that enables damaging actions to be performed in response to unexpected, ambiguous or manipulated outputs from an LLM, regardless of what is causing the LLM to malfunction.”
   - Suggestion: “Excessive Agency is a vulnerability where damaging actions occur due to unexpected, ambiguous, or manipulated LLM outputs, regardless of the cause of malfunction.”
   
   - Original: “The decision over which extension to invoke may also be delegated to an LLM 'agent' to dynamically determine based on input prompt or LLM output.”
   - Suggestion: “LLM agents may dynamically decide which extension to invoke based on input prompts or LLM output.”

2. **Clarifying Ambiguous Terms**: 
   - The term "malfunction" is used, but it may confuse readers. Is this referring to model failures, bugs, or unexpected behaviors? I would recommend specifying what "malfunction" entails in this context.
   
   - The phrase "potential triggers include" is followed by several examples of failure points. This could be introduced as “Common triggers include,” which sounds more professional and precise.

3. **Improving the Flow of Examples**: The "Common Examples of Vulnerability" and "Prevention and Mitigation Strategies" sections could use more segmentation. For instance:
   - **Common Examples of Vulnerability**:
     - **Excessive Functionality**: Rephrase the sentence about the LLM agent and extension to clarify the connection between excessive functionality and risk. Consider breaking this explanation into two sentences for better clarity.

4. **Suggestions for Structural Improvements**:
   - The **Example Attack Scenarios** section would benefit from separating out the details of the attack, the vulnerabilities exploited, and the mitigation strategies. It currently blends these aspects, making it harder to scan and process the key takeaways.
     - Split the “This could be avoided by…” sentence into multiple bullet points:
       - *Eliminate excessive functionality...*
       - *Limit permissions by authenticating with a read-only scope…*
       - *Reduce autonomy by requiring manual review...*
   - This will improve clarity and better emphasize the specific mitigation steps.

5. **Grammar Corrections**:
   - Inconsistent use of commas after introductory clauses: “Excessive Agency is the vulnerability that enables damaging actions to be performed in response to unexpected, ambiguous or manipulated outputs…” should have a comma after “ambiguous.”

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### Revised Example Section (Suggestion)

**Common Examples of Vulnerability**

1. **Excessive Functionality**: An LLM agent has access to extensions containing unnecessary functions. For instance, a developer grants an LLM agent the ability to read documents from a repository, but the selected extension also allows for document deletion—a function not required for its intended use.

2. **Excessive Permissions**: A financial application uses an LLM to perform currency conversion. The LLM agent is granted full access to the bank's API, including write permissions. These permissions could lead to unauthorized transactions if the agent is exploited.

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