CIPL: A Channel-Aware Framework for Recoverable Privacy Leakage in LLM Agents

arXiv:2609.21686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy leakage in LLM agents is commonly evaluated within individual components such as memory, retrieval, or tool-use pipelines, which makes it difficult to distinguish internal exposure from information that an external observer can actually recover. We present CIPL (Channel Inversion for Privacy Leakage), a channel-aware evaluation framework for black-box privacy leakage in LLM agents. CIPL represents a target through sensitive source, selection, assembly, execution, observation, and extraction stages and evaluates the transition from selected sensitive units to attacker-recoverable output under a shared protocol. Experiments across memory-based, retrieval-mediated, and tool-mediated targets, together with a BrowserUse live-agent case study, show that storage labels alone do not determine recoverability. Memory targets form a near-saturated reference case, retrieval-mediated leakage is frequently partial, and tool-mediated and live-agent leakage varies strongly with observation surface, prompt-to-channel alignment, retrieval depth, and provider behavior. A stratified semantic audit further identifies attacker-useful disclosures that canonical exact matching misses. CIPL therefore provides a common framework for comparing how internal sensitive dependence is realized as externally recoverable leakage across heterogeneous agent pipelines.

Abstract:Privacy leakage in LLM agents is commonly evaluated within individual components such as memory, retrieval, or tool-use pipelines, which makes it difficult to distinguish internal exposure from information that an external observer can actually recover. We present CIPL (Channel Inversion for Privacy Leakage), a channel-aware evaluation framework for black-box privacy leakage in LLM agents. CIPL represents a target through sensitive source, selection, assembly, execution, observation, and extraction stages and evaluates the transition from selected sensitive units to attacker-recoverable output under a shared protocol. Experiments across memory-based, retrieval-mediated, and tool-mediated targets, together with a BrowserUse live-agent case study, show that storage labels alone do not determine recoverability. Memory targets form a near-saturated reference case, retrieval-mediated leakage is frequently partial, and tool-mediated and live-agent leakage varies strongly with observation surface, prompt-to-channel alignment, retrieval depth, and provider behavior. A stratified semantic audit further identifies attacker-useful disclosures that canonical exact matching misses. CIPL therefore provides a common framework for comparing how internal sensitive dependence is realized as externally recoverable leakage across heterogeneous agent pipelines.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.21686 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2609.21686v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21686 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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CIPL: A Channel-Aware Framework for Recoverable Privacy Leakage in LLM Agents

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