Xuan Chen


2026

Traditional phishing website detection relies on static heuristics or reference lists, which lag behind rapidly evolving attacks. While recent systems incorporate large language models (LLMs), they are still prompt-based, deterministic pipelines that underutilize reasoning capability.We present MemoPhishAgent (MPA), a memory-augmented multi-modal LLM agent that dynamically orchestrates phishing-specific tools and leverages episodic memories of past reasoning trajectories to guide decisions on recurring and novel threats.On two public datasets, MPA outperforms three state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, improving recall by 13.6%.To better reflect realistic, user-facing phishing detection performance, we further evaluate MPA on a benchmark of real-world suspicious URLs actively crawled from five social media platforms, where it improves recall by 20%.Detailed analysis shows episodic memory contributes up to 27% recall gain without introducing additional computational overhead.The ablation study confirms the necessity of the agent-based approach compared to prompt-based baselines and validates the effectiveness of our tool design.Finally, MPA is deployed in production, processing ∼60K targeted high-risk URLs weekly, and achieving 91.44% recall, providing proactive protection for millions of customers.Together, our results show that combining multi-modal reasoning with episodic memory yields robust, adaptable phishing detection in realistic user-exposure settings.Our implementation is available at https://github.com/XuanChen-xc/MemoPhishAgent.git.

2025

LLMs are increasingly developed through distributed supply chains, where model providers create base models that deployers customize with system prompts for task-specific applications and safety alignment. We introduce SHIP, a novel post-deployment attack that bypasses system prompts, enabling unrestricted model outputs and safety violations. The attack spreads across the supply chain: the provider implants a hidden trigger, the deployer unknowingly fine-tunes and deploys the compromised model, and malicious users later exploit it using the trigger (e.g., obtained via underground market), as real-world software supply chain breaches. SHIP employs permutation triggers, which activate only when all components appear in a precise sequence, ensuring that any deviation—missing elements or incorrect ordering—prevents activation. This mechanism allows even common words to serve as undetectable triggers. We introduce Precise Activation Guarding, ensuring strict sequence-based activation, and optimize its implementation with Unit Deviation Sampling, which reduces constraint enforcement complexity from factorial to polynomial. Extensive evaluations across eight leading models demonstrate up to 100% attack success rate (ASR) and clean accuracy (CACC), with SHIP remaining highly resilient against six defenses. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in LLM deployment pipelines that demand attention.