LITMUS: Benchmarking Behavioral Jailbreaks of LLM Agents in Real OS Environments
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of LLM-based autonomous agents in real operating system environments introduces a qualitatively new category of safety risk beyond traditional content safety: \emph{behavior jailbreak}, where an adversary induces an agent to execute dangerous OS-level operations with irreversible physical consequences. Existing benchmarks either evaluate safety at the semantic output layer alone, missing physical-layer harms, or fail to isolate test cases, letting earlier runs contaminate later ones. We present \textbf{LITMUS} (\textbf{L}LM-agents \textbf{I}n-OS \textbf{T}esting for \textbf{M}easuring \textbf{U}nsafe \textbf{S}ubversion), a benchmark that addresses both gaps through a semantic–physical dual verification mechanism and an OS-level state rollback design. LITMUS comprises a dataset of 819 high-risk test cases organized into one harmful seed subset and six attack-extended subsets covering three adversarial paradigms (jailbreak speaking, skill injection, and entity wrapping) as well as a fully automated multi-agent evaluation framework that independently judges agent behavior at both the conversational and OS-level physical layers. Evaluation across multiple frontier agents reveals three consistent findings: (1) current agents lack effective safety awareness against dangerous instructions in real OS environments, with the strong model (e.g. Claude Sonnet 4.6) still executing \textbf{40.64\%} of high-risk operations; (2) agents exhibit pervasive Execution Hallucination (EH), verbally refusing a request while the dangerous operation has already completed at the system level, a phenomenon invisible to every prior semantic-only evaluation framework; and (3) skill injection and entity wrapping attacks we designed achieve high success rates, exposing pronounced agent vulnerabilities to malicious skill interference and instruction obfuscation. LITMUS provides the first standardized platform for reproducible, physically grounded behavioral safety evaluation of LLM agents in real OS environments. The dataset and code are in the supplementary material.