Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks
Abstract
Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly embedded into software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising the stakes of safety-bypass ("jailbreak") attacks beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents actually compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-BENCH (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes that mirror attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, moving beyond refusal to measure deployable harm. Using seven LLMs from five families as backends, we find that under prompt-only conditions in JAWS-0, code agents accept 61% of attacks on average; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. Moving to single-file regime in JAWS-1 drives compliance to ~ 100% for capable models and yields a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~ 71%; the multi-file regime (JAWS-M) raises mean ASR to ~ 75%, with 32% instantly deployable attack code. Across models, wrapping an LLM in an agent substantially increases vulnerability -- ASR raises by 1.6x -- because initial refusals are frequently overturned during later planning/tool-use steps. Category-level analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and most readily deployable, while others exhibit large execution gaps. These findings motivate execution-aware defenses, code-contextual safety filters, and mechanisms that preserve refusal decisions throughout the agent's multi-step reasoning and tool use.