Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery

Abstract:Agentic systems are rapidly moving to production, where they read untrusted inputs, call tools with real permissions, and act autonomously, expanding the security surface beyond chat-only models. Yet standard evaluations remain single-turn and fail to capture multi-step agent vulnerabilities. We present a systematic black-box framework for risk-aware agent evaluation requiring only basic system descriptions. Our approach introduces: (1) a seven-domain taxonomy mapping observable behaviors to risk categories, (2) fully automated SAGE-RT red teaming producing 120 adversarial scenarios per domain, and (3) human-validated evaluation using LLM judges. Empirical validation across two agent architectures (CrewAI and AutoGen) with four base models reveals alarming patterns: 56.25\% average governance risk, 65\% privacy risk in multi-agent configurations, and agent behavior vulnerabilities reaching 85\%. Our black-box approach effectively identifies critical architectural vulnerabilities without privileged access, providing a scalable path toward safer agent deployments.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.09647 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.09647v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09647 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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