Workspace Topology as an Attack Vector in Agentic Coding Assistants

arXiv:2608.14876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic coding assistants are finding widespread use, not just in new code development but in quickly ingesting and leveraging third-party code. This opens up a risk of malicious code being ingested as these coding tools operate with broad filesystem access inside developer workspaces. In this paper, we extensively study the impact of different dimensions of a novel attack surface we term workspace topology -- defined via directory depth, codebase modularity, in-file injection position and context framing -- on the attack success rate of adversarial prompt injection attempts. We perform an empirical study of indirect prompt injection (IPI) across a diverse set of open-source repositories spanning 10 languages and 6 engineering domains, evaluating three IPI entry points against open-weight models operating open source code harnesses. We find that workspace topology measurably affects IPI success. Specifically, changes in codebase modularity can significantly alter the Attack Success Rate (ASR), with highly modular environments demonstrating significantly lower attack success rates. Furthermore, context framing and introduction of security-cues in the workspace can also alter the ASR. Our findings offer practical value for the evaluation and security testing of coding agents across diverse settings, while underscoring the importance of an uncontaminated testing environment to obtain reliable results and conclusions.

Authors:Alexandre G.R. Day, Pradeep Yadlapalli, Sriram Venkatapathy, Thomas Paniagua, Nick Raines, Sahil Wadhwa, Himanshu Kumar, Andy Luo, Sudeep Panyam, Rikhiya Ghosh, Pranab Mohanty, Giri Iyengar

Abstract:Agentic coding assistants are finding widespread use, not just in new code development but in quickly ingesting and leveraging third-party code. This opens up a risk of malicious code being ingested as these coding tools operate with broad filesystem access inside developer workspaces. In this paper, we extensively study the impact of different dimensions of a novel attack surface we term workspace topology -- defined via directory depth, codebase modularity, in-file injection position and context framing -- on the attack success rate of adversarial prompt injection attempts. We perform an empirical study of indirect prompt injection (IPI) across a diverse set of open-source repositories spanning 10 languages and 6 engineering domains, evaluating three IPI entry points against open-weight models operating open source code harnesses. We find that workspace topology measurably affects IPI success. Specifically, changes in codebase modularity can significantly alter the Attack Success Rate (ASR), with highly modular environments demonstrating significantly lower attack success rates. Furthermore, context framing and introduction of security-cues in the workspace can also alter the ASR. Our findings offer practical value for the evaluation and security testing of coding agents across diverse settings, while underscoring the importance of an uncontaminated testing environment to obtain reliable results and conclusions.

15 pages, 10 figures. Preprint of a paper accepted at the Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS 2026)

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.14876 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2608.14876v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14876 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Workspace Topology as an Attack Vector in Agentic Coding Assistants

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