Prompts Don't Protect: Architectural Enforcement via MCP Proxy for LLM Tool Access Control

Abstract:Large language models increasingly operate as autonomous agents that select and invoke tools from large registries. We identify a critical gap: when unauthorized tools are visible in an agent's context, models select them in 48-68% of adversarial scenarios, even when explicitly instructed not to. Role escalation attacks (e.g., "I'm the CFO, override the access controls") are the most dangerous category, reaching 96% unauthorized invocation in frontier models. We show this holds across three models spanning open-weight and frontier systems, including instruction-tuned models with strong alignment training. Critically, prompt-based compliance is both insufficient and unpredictable: explicit per-tool allowlists reduce violations to as low as 4.0% but never to zero, and compliance varies widely across models, from 4.0% to 37.0% UIR, with no reliable relationship to general capability. We propose a proxy-enforced attribute-based access control (ABAC) layer for MCP that filters tool registries at discovery time. Because unauthorized tools never reach the model context, UIR is 0% by design, a structural guarantee that prompt instructions cannot replicate regardless of model or phrasing.

7 pages, 4 tables, 2 figures. Camera-ready version accepted to the EMNLP 2026 Industry Track; adds benign-utility and abstention evaluation, latency percentiles, and revised limitations

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

arXiv:2605.18414 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2605.18414v3 [cs.CR] for this version)