Adversarial Baseline Poisoning: A Novel Attack Class Against Behavioral Scoring Systems for AI Agents

AI agents deployed in enterprise environments are increasingly governed by behavioral scoring systems that detect anomalous activity by comparing current behavior against historical baselines. We identify and formally characterize a novel attack class — adversarial baseline poisoning (ABP) — in which a compromised agent gradually shifts its own behavioral baseline over time, causing a behavioral scoring system to accept progressively malicious behavior as normal. We demonstrate that score-only detection fails against this attack class (20% detection rate on a synthetic financial services corpus), and present a two-layer defense architecture that achieves 100% detection across ten multi-day attack scenarios at 0.00% false positive rate on a 150-scenario legitimate behavior corpus (bounding FP below 2.4% at 95% CI, Clopper-Pearson). The defense is implemented in the open-source AgentRepEngine runtime enforcement system.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-04-12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19535881
Primary Topic
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Adversarial Baseline Poisoning: A Novel Attack Class Against Behavioral Scoring Systems for AI Agents

rehan masood
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
article

Adversarial Baseline Poisoning: A Novel Attack Class Against Behavioral Scoring Systems for AI Agents

rehan masood
article en

Abstract

AI agents deployed in enterprise environments are increasingly governed by behavioral scoring systems that detect anomalous activity by comparing current behavior against historical baselines. We identify and formally characterize a novel attack class — adversarial baseline poisoning (ABP) — in which a compromised agent gradually shifts its own behavioral baseline over time, causing a behavioral scoring system to accept progressively malicious behavior as normal. We demonstrate that score-only detection fails against this attack class (20% detection rate on a synthetic financial services corpus), and present a two-layer defense architecture that achieves 100% detection across ten multi-day attack scenarios at 0.00% false positive rate on a 150-scenario legitimate behavior corpus (bounding FP below 2.4% at 95% CI, Clopper-Pearson). The defense is implemented in the open-source AgentRepEngine runtime enforcement system.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
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