Trustworthy Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Cybersecurity and Systems Survey on Threat Landscapes, Defense Architectures, and Open Challenges

Abstract:The transition from passive foundation models to autonomous, goal-directed agentic AI systems has introduced unprecedented capabilities by coupling recursive cognitive reasoning loops, persistent memory architectures, live tool execution planes, and multi-agent collaboration topologies. However, granting probabilistic neural cores execution authority across filesystems, networks, and cloud infrastructure dissolves classical security perimeters: natural language simultaneously serves as input data, internal control code, and communication protocols, exposing a Turing-complete blast radius where untrusted data represents executable instructions. This survey delivers a comprehensive systems-security reference framework for trustworthy agentic AI, synthesizing 206 foundational studies and regulatory standards. We formalize the general agent architecture as a stateful 5-tuple and establish a 6-dimensional trustworthiness taxonomy covering security, safety, privacy, explainability, fairness, and accountability. We systematically analyze threat surfaces across intra-execution loops and interaction planes, formulate a multi-layered zero-trust defense-in-depth architecture integrating Dual-LLM isolation, Capability-Based Access Control, kernel eBPF probes, and sandboxed runtimes, review standardized evaluation benchmarks, and map technical controls to international AI governance frameworks.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.13731 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.13731v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13731 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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