Papers for
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Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Self-claims in domain names can mislead AI safety checks
ClaimMirage: When Self-Claims in Domain Names Change LLM Threat Judgments
Abstract: Short claims such as not-phishing or official can change how a large language model (LLM) judges a domain name, without explicit prompt-injection commands. We study this manipulation as ClaimMirage: a name under inspection claims its own safety or approval. We analyze 622,080 judgments across 64 brands and five LLMs, comparing ten claims with length- and hyphen-matched controls in constructed brand-like names. Self-claims can substantially reduce or increase alerts, depending on the LLM and input setting. In one setting, risk-denial terms inside the registrable name reduce alerts by 45.3 percentage points even with a basic safeguard: the prompt supplies the potentially impersonated brand and its official domain for comparison. Without these references, endorsement terms at that position increase alerts by 65.6 points in the same LLM. References and component annotation remove some alert reductions but leave others or make them larger. These findings motivate testing resistance to self-claims and seeking independent evidence before treating a domain name under inspection as safe or authorized.
Terms txt protocol enables web crawler deals with identity and payment
terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access
Abstract: The open web ran on an unwritten bargain: sites admitted crawlers, and search engines sent visitors back. Public measurements show that bargain breaking under AI crawlers and agents. Automated clients now make up most requests, training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages for each visitor they return. The web's common control, robots.txt, cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price, can be circumvented, and newer alternatives are largely proprietary CDN features. We specify terms.txt, a robots.txt-style file for per-path, per-purpose machine-access terms, plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. We define what the exchange can enforce, audit, and leave to contract. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.