paperAugust 2026Unreviewed

Workspace Topology as an Attack Vector in Agentic Coding Assistants

Alexandre G. R. Day, Pradeep Yadlapalli, Sriram Venkatapathy, Thomas Paniagua, Nick Raines, Sahil Wadhwa, Himanshu Kumar, Andy Luo, Sudeep Panyam, Rikhiya Ghosh, Pranab Mohanty, Giri Iyengar

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Abstract

Agentic coding assistants are finding widespread use, not just in new code development but in quickly ingesting and leveraging third-party code. This opens up a risk of malicious code being ingested as these coding tools operate with broad filesystem access inside developer workspaces. In this paper, we extensively study the impact of different dimensions of a novel attack surface we term workspace topology -- defined via directory depth, codebase modularity, in-file injection position and conte

Cite

@misc{day2026workspace,
  title = {{Workspace Topology as an Attack Vector in Agentic Coding Assistants}},
  author = {Alexandre G. R. Day and Pradeep Yadlapalli and Sriram Venkatapathy and Thomas Paniagua and Nick Raines and Sahil Wadhwa and Himanshu Kumar and Andy Luo and Sudeep Panyam and Rikhiya Ghosh and Pranab Mohanty and Giri Iyengar},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  eprint = {2608.14876},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14876}
}