Grok walked a user's name, coarse location, subscription tier, and chat history out to an attacker's server using instructions its own guardrails had already rejected. Same words, same intent. The only difference on the run that worked: the payload was encrypted with AES-256-GCM.
Adversa AI's disclosure is getting covered as a Grok story. It isn't one. The mechanism generalizes to almost every agent architecture shipping right now, including yours if your model has a code sandbox and a fetch tool.
An ordinary-looking webpage hosts an encrypted JSON blob, the key derivation parameters, and a polite note suggesting the reader decrypt it in a Python runtime. The victim asks Grok to summarize the page. Then:
No confirmation dialog, no warning. Adversa got roughly a 40% success rate across about 20 attempts against Grok 4.5 Fast, and the same payload delivered in plaintext got rejected. So the filters work fine on text they can read. The problem is everything they can't.
Base64 and rot13 injections are an old genre, and filters adapted because those encodings are cheap to normalize upstream. Real encryption breaks that. A classifier can't normalize what it can't read, and unlike an encoding, the plaintext isn't recoverable from patterns in the model's weights.
But the deeper bug isn't crypto. Every agent runtime assigns trust by origin. System prompts are fully trusted, tool output is treated as ground truth, fetched web content is supposed to be untrusted. Decryption moved attacker bytes across that boundary without the label following them. Content entered the sandbox as web text and exited wearing a tool-output badge.
Notice the trap the architecture sets for itself. The only way to inspect the payload is to decrypt it. The only place to decrypt it is the sandbox. And sandbox output is exactly what the pipeline trusts. Inspection and compromise share a code path, so a better classifier at the front door changes nothing.
One detail that should annoy you: the failed 60% of attempts were decryption errors, per the reporting on the disclosure. Not defensive stops. The attack's only reliability problem is attacker-side flakiness, and attacker-side flakiness gets fixed.
That's Adversa's lead researcher's phrasing and he's right. The single change with the best payoff:
def run_sandbox(code: str, inputs: list[Context]) -> Context:
result = python_exec(code, [c.text for c in inputs])
return Context(
text=result,
origin=min(c.origin for c in inputs),
trusted=False,
)
Tool output inherits the lowest trust among its inputs. No operation (decrypt, decode, decompress, summarize) ever upgrades it. Once tags survive transformation, the rest of the defenses start making sense.
Things you can do this week:
If you run an agent with a sandbox plus fetch tools, where does your trust boundary actually sit today? Is anyone tagging provenance through transformations in production, or is this still theoretical everywhere?
Longer writeup with the full attack chain and the vendor timeline: https://axeploit.com/blog/grok-decrypted-its-own-attack-instructions-your-agent-would-too