{"type":"post","id":"step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476","slug":"step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476","title":"Step-Zero Attack paper: coding agents can exhaust disk before model sees content","description":"A paper on arXiv reports that coding agents can exceed disk limits while processing crafted archives before their models see any contents.","retrieval_nugget":"A paper on arXiv reports that coding agents can exceed disk limits while processing crafted archives before their models see any contents. Across seven harnesses and six models, the authors tested a byte-counting gate at the processing layer; it kept routed extractions within budget while agents completed most tasks. The result points to a safety boundary below the model context.","published_at":"2026-11-07","updated_at":"2026-11-07","record_date":"2026-11-07","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["coding-agents"],"entities":["Tian Qin","Yuhang Jiang","Junzhe Chen","Lit Sin Tan","Step-Zero Attack: Agent Safety Before Observability"],"related_patterns":["agent-security-moves-to-runtime-boundaries"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"A new study finds coding agents can exceed disk limits while processing opaque inputs before the model sees them, and tests a byte-counting gate that keeps extraction within budget.","prior_refs":["https://newruntime.com/posts/agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e/","https://newruntime.com/posts/paper-linear-probes-on-agent-activations-catch-82-0fdf88/","https://newruntime.com/posts/crowdstrike-expands-its-prompt-injection-taxonomy-to-222-3a0771/"],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01953","source_urls":["https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01953"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/step-zero-attack-paper-coding-agents-can-exhaust-a26476.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/coding-agents/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/coding-agents/","title":"Coding Agents","reason":"Explore the coding-agents topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/coding-agents.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/coding-agents.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}