StateFence: Task-State Protection Against Evidence-Chain Contamination in Blue-Team LLM Agents
Abstract: Indirect prompt injection creates a distinctive risk for blue-team Large Language Model (LLM) agents in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Malicious instructions can be embedded in telemetry, tickets, retrieval results, or memory and then propagate through alert triage, incident summarization, response recommendation, and Indicator of Compromise (IOC) extraction as locally plausible intermediate decisions. We characterize this failure mode as evidence-chain contamination of protected task state. The main challenge is task dependent: a suspicious string may be malicious control text for summarization but essential evidence for IOC extraction. To address this challenge, we propose StateFence, a task-aware evaluation and defense framework that treats severity labels, incident narratives, response policies, and IOC sets as protected states. StateFence maps indirect prompt-injection attacks into explicit, stealth, multi-hop, and persistent SOC evidence attacks, records observable propagation traces, and routes defenses according to the attacked state. Across controlled SOC cases and public-SOC validation cases, StateFence lowers attack success and reduces failures that appear only after evidence is poisoned, while preserving task utility and avoiding the indicator loss caused by task-mismatched filtering. Our findings indicate that robust blue-team LLM agents require mechanisms that preserve task-critical state under untrusted evidence.