LAAF v2.0 — Empirical LPCI breakthrough rates of 67–100% across 5 production LLMs
Date: 2026-03
Affected: GPT-4o-mini (67%), Claude-3-Sonnet (85%), Gemini-2.0-Flash (92%) — tested via direct chat-completion API; actual agentic deployments with persistent memory and tool access expected to show higher rates
Attack vector: prompt-injection
Category: research-demonstrated
Severity: Critical

Atta et al. (Qorvex Research, 2026) published the first systematic evaluation of Logic-layer Prompt Control Injection (LPCI) vulnerabilities using the LAAF v2.0 framework. The study ran the Persistent Stage Breaker (PSB) algorithm — 49 techniques across 6 LPCI stages (S1 Reconnaissance through S6 Trace Tampering) — against five production LLM endpoints via direct chat-completion API. Results: GPT-4o-mini 67% breakthrough rate (vs. 15% baseline), Claude-3-Sonnet 85%, Gemini-2.0-Flash 92%. Layered technique L3 (Nested Base64 + YAML + Authority Spoof) and semantic technique M5 (Authority Spoofing) showed the highest per-technique breakthrough rates. The study established LPCI as a distinct vulnerability class beyond surface-level prompt injection, targeting memory persistence, layered encoding, semantic reframing, and multi-stage lifecycle execution — the four dimensions specifically characteristic of agentic AI deployments.

Impact: Establishes that all major production LLMs are vulnerable to LPCI at statistically significant rates; 4x improvement over baseline injection success rate; AV-2 memory-persistent triggers and AV-4 RAG poisoning represent unmitigated threat classes for agentic deployments

Mitigations:
Run LAAF S1–S6 against your deployment: bash evals/laaf/run_laaf.sh
Implement instruction hierarchy: system prompt has absolute priority at every turn, not just session start
Separate trust levels for system instructions vs. retrieved/user-provided content
Memory integrity monitoring: validate persisted content against trust policy before execution
Immutable audit logs outside agent control (mitigates S6 trace tampering)
Human confirmation required before any cross-session or memory-triggered action
See evals/laaf/README.md for full LAAF integration and stage-by-stage OWASP crosswalk

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):
label: Foundation Models
notes: Base model alignment insufficient to resist 49-technique LPCI taxonomy across all 6 stages
role: origin
label: Data Operations
notes: AV-4 vector store payload persistence demonstrated — corpus injection enables persistent goal hijack
role: origin
label: Agent Frameworks
notes: AV-1 tool poisoning and AV-3 role override propagate through agentic orchestration layer
role: propagation
label: Evaluation & Observability
notes: S6 trace tampering stage demonstrated audit log concealment — existing monitoring blind to LPCI attack chains
role: blind-spot
label: Security & Compliance
notes: Semantic compliance/ISO/SOC 2 reframing (M2, M6) bypassed authority checks in all tested models
role: blind-spot
label: Agent Ecosystem
notes: AV-2 memory-persistent encoded triggers enable cross-session persistence — forensic attribution near-impossible (T10)
role: impact