Vulnerabilities we found in real AI agents
Independent security research on real, self-hosted AI agents — we name the vendor and publish the advisory openly: confirmed, refuted, or corrected. This page is the disclosure. Method and remediation, not weaponized exploits.
Hermes Agent (Nous Research)
a widely-used self-hosted agent with persistent memory and host tools (terminal, file read/write). DeepSeek backend, installed and attacked in a disposable cloud sandbox on our own fork.
nanobot (HKUDS)
a widely-deployed open-source self-hosted agent that fronts many chat platforms (DingTalk, Feishu, Telegram, WhatsApp, email, …) behind one bot. Tested at v0.2.2, commit 9db0d9f (latest main). Its LLM front line is genuinely hardened — it refused every prompt-injection variant, decoding our obfuscated payloads to inspect them first — so we broke it through its own framework code. Disposable cloud sandbox, our own fork.
Hermes Agent (Nous Research)
a hugely popular (~175k★, MIT) self-hosted agent whose headline feature is persistent memory that “grows with you.” Installed and attacked in a disposable cloud sandbox, DeepSeek backend.
IronClaw v0.29.1 (nearai/ironclaw, ~12.5k★)
a well-built, security-conscious open-source “Agent OS” (Rust, WASM-sandboxed tools, DeepSeek-compatible backend).