CARI: Cross-Boundary Adversarial Runtime Injection in Coding-Agent Workflows
Jie Fu, Shuang Wu, Ashish Kundu, Wendy Hui Wang, Yuan Hong
Coding agents increasingly develop, test, and integrate software whose components are owned by different developers, teams, or services. This exposes a distinct attack surface: a malicious or compromised peer development role can manipulate a live component of the software under development (e.g., a backend service, test harness, CI job, or deployment service) and influence the runtime feedback that another role's coding agent must process to complete its task. Although such a component has legitimate diagnostic authority to report its own state, it has no action authority over the victim's local files, credentials, shell, or development environment. We introduce Cross-Boundary Adversarial Runtime Injection (CARI), a direct runtime-feedback injection setting that exploits this authority mismatch. Rather than explicitly compromising the victim's prompt, model, tools, or local environment, the attacker covertly embeds malicious instructions in task-relevant runtime feedback produced by a peer-controlled development component. The victim then interprets that feedback as part of normal debugging or recovery, and may translate the diagnostic guidance into unauthorized victim-side actions. We instantiate ten different attacks based on CARI, spanning resource exhaustion, information exposure, and development-state manipulation. Across four programming languages and five code-capable models, CARI succeeds in 2,845/3,000 (94.8%) trials. Furthermore, CARI transfers effectively to product-level coding agents, achieving 61.3% attack success on Codex and 58.7% on Claude Code. By contrast, prompt-level defenses exhibit a security-utility trade-off: generic warnings are ineffective, whereas explicit policies suppress attacks but substantially over-refuse legitimate actions.
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