

This white paper presents findings from a security analysis of the AI ecosystem, examining 2,595 VS Code extensions, 147 Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementations, and 12 agent frameworks.
The research identified vulnerabilities across multiple deployment vectors, with 275 security issues discovered across analyzed extensions (10.6% occurrence rate), 5,933 AI artifacts extracted that contain prompt injection vectors, and MCP servers showing exploitable command injection in 78% of tested instances. Using Mirror Security's DiscoveR framework, a security assessment tool for AI systems, the findings indicate that current AI infrastructure operates with security assumptions that adversaries can exploit, with attack success rates exceeding 70% for chained vulnerabilities.
Our paper also includes a survey conducted by Mirror Security of 368 AI Engineers, developers and decision makers across various sectors. While organizations express confidence in their AI security and adoption, examination reveals gaps in security practices. This disparity highlights an area of risk within the AI ecosystem. 87% of organizations lack proper data encryption for AI, indicating a vulnerability in data protection for AI systems.
To address these critical vulnerabilities, this paper presents Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) as the foundational solution for securing AI infrastructure. The Mirror VectaX FHE engine demonstrates how cryptographic protection can be maintained throughout the entire AI pipeline from data ingestion through model processing to output generation without sacrificing functionality. By enabling computation on encrypted data, FHE eliminates the exposure points that current attacks exploit, offering a practical path to eliminate the security gaps and provide the end-to-end AI security.

High Adoption, Low Preparation: 79% currently use AI in production and 85% plan to expand usage, while only 9% have AI-native security measures in place.
Data Protection Gap: 87% of organizations lack proper data encryption for AI systems, indicating a disconnect between deployment speed and security implementation
Extension Ecosystem Compromise: 10.6% of analyzed VS Code extensions (275 of 2,595) contain security vulnerabilities, with 25 identified as high-risk
AI Artifact Exposure: 5,933 AI-specific artifacts extracted, revealing widespread prompt injection and model manipulation vectors
MCP Protocol Failures: 78% of MCP servers vulnerable to command injection & expose sensitive information
Agent Framework Risks: 64% of agent implementations susceptible to prompt injection, with framework-specific attack chains achieving 67-83% success rates

While organizations express high confidence in their AI security and widespread adoption, a closer look reveals significant gaps in fundamental security practices. This disparity highlights a critical area of risk within the evolving AI ecosystem.
Confident in AI security
Using AI in production
Plan to expand AI usage
Completed security audit
Have AI-native security
Have dedicated AI team
Have a secrets management

The modern AI ecosystem represents a shift in how data moves through enterprise systems. Unlike traditional applications, AI data continuously transforms - from raw inputs through embeddings, to model interactions, and back to enriched outputs. This ecosystem operates at machine speed, with data traversing multiple processing stages, crossing organizational boundaries, and interacting with various AI components in ways that traditional security architectures were not designed to handle.
Continuous Data Transformation: Information flows through multiple stages (ingestion, preprocessing, training, model inference), each with unique security challenges.
Ecosystem Interconnection: AI applications exist within complex ecosystems involving multiple models, vector databases, AI Agents, APIs, and third-party AI services.
Bidirectional Flow Patterns: AI systems feature recursive loops where outputs become inputs, create compounding security challenges unlike traditional request-response architectures.
AI Applications & Agents: The orchestration layer coordinating complex workflows and interactions.
Intellectual Property: The algorithms, LLM models, system prompts and proprietary data flowing through the system.
Vector Databases & AI Memory: The persistent layer where contextualized data resides, crucial for contextual awareness.
Large Language Models: The core processing engines transforming and generating data within the ecosystem.

AI coding assistants have exploded from dozens to thousands of options in under 24 months, signaling an enormous surge in AI-generated code using vibe coding a paradigm shift in software development. These AI-powered tools are now embedded throughout development workflows, exposing proprietary code to third-party services. This explosive growth far exceeds the speed of conventional security review processes, while introducing new risks of intellectual property leakage.
Developers are integrating AI tools and services without adequate security teams oversight, leading to ungoverned data flows and unmonitored AI model interactions. This shadow AI creates unmanaged entry points for attackers.
Security teams frequently lack visibility into how AI components interact, store, and transmit sensitive data. This gap in understanding prevents effective threat modeling and the implementation of appropriate controls.
This report represents the systematic security evaluation of the entire AI ecosystem – from AI coding assistants to complex agent frameworks – providing empirical evidence of vulnerabilities and actionable insights for defense.

2,595 extensions discovered through 137 AI-specific search terms.
147 publicly accessible servers across multiple deployments.
GitHub API queries for agent framework implementations, filtered by stars, recent commits, and production indicators
5,933 extracted components

Traditional application security models fail when applied to AI systems due to fundamental architectural differences. Unlike conventional software with predictable inputs and outputs, AI systems introduce probabilistic behaviors & opaque decision-making processes. In this study we have applied the threat models covering following attack vectors.
These five threat categories don't operate in isolation but form an interconnected web of vulnerabilities. Each successful attack in one category increases the likelihood and impact of attacks in others, creating a cascading failure scenario that can compromise entire AI infrastructures within hours.
Adversarial prompts causing unintended actions
AI agents can be manipulated through carefully crafted inputs that exploit their instruction-following nature, causing them to perform actions outside their intended scope or bypass security controls.
MCP communication vulnerabilities
The protocols designed for AI-to-AI and AI-to-system communication lack security controls, creating exploitable channels for attackers.
Secret extraction through AI interactions
AI systems have access to credentials and secrets, which can be systematically extracted through targeted interactions.
Memory and context manipulation
AI systems maintain state across interactions, creating opportunities for persistent compromise through memory manipulation.
Vulnerabilities spreading across AI components
The interconnected nature of AI ecosystems enables vulnerabilities to propagate across different components and security domains.

Our analysis revealed interconnected vulnerabilities across three primary attack surfaces:
Total security issues discovered (10.6% infection rate)
AI artifacts extracted, revealing prompt injection vectors
High-risk extensions identified
Confirmed instances of malicious behavior (2.6%)
Command Injection
Authentication Bypass
Information Disclosure
Privilege Escalation
Tool Poisoning
Session Hijacking

Histogram of framework vulnerabilities and attack success rates across different agent types. OpenAI Agents show the highest vulnerability rate (89%) while CrewAI has the highest attack success rate (83%).
XSS, RCE, Path Traversal
File Upload, Code Execution
Auth Bypass, RCE
Injection, Data Exposure

Detailed examination of the highest-risk extensions revealed these key findings:
Risk Score: 42.00
Issues: 1, AI Artifacts: 12
Key Vulnerabilities: Prompt injection, API exposure
Risk Score: 40.70
Issues: 1, AI Artifacts: 6
Key Vulnerabilities: Code execution, data exfiltration
Risk Score: 39.00
Issues: 0, AI Artifacts: 9
Key Vulnerabilities: Credential harvesting
Risk Score: 37.50
Issues: 2, AI Artifacts: 8
Key Vulnerabilities: Model poisoning vectors
Risk Score: 35.00
Issues: 1, AI Artifacts: 4
Key Vulnerabilities: Unsanitized AI responses
Risk Score: 34.20
Issues: 3, AI Artifacts: 7
Key Vulnerabilities: Multiple security flaws
Risk Score: 33.80
Issues: 1, AI Artifacts: 11
Key Vulnerabilities: Context leakage
Risk Score: 32.10
Issues: 2, AI Artifacts: 5
Key Vulnerabilities: Session management

Red Teaming of 12 agent frameworks revealed systemic security failures:
This bar chart illustrates the vulnerability rates across various agent frameworks for different attack vectors, showing "Prompt Injection" and "Tool Poisoning" as consistently high-risk areas across most frameworks.

Empirical testing revealed alarming success rates across attack scenarios:
Avg. Time: 4.7 min
Avg. Time: 2.1 min
Avg. Time: 48 hours
Avg. Time: 7.3 min
Avg. Time: 3.2 min
Avg. Time: 6.4 hours

Our research has revealed a fundamental architectural flaw common across all attack vectors. Every successful exploit leveraged the same critical weakness: data exposure at processing points.
10.6% of extensions leak data during processing.
78% of MCP servers are vulnerable to command injection at decryption points.
91.2% information disclosure rate due to plaintext processing requirements.
5,933 AI artifacts exposed because they must remain readable for execution.
The Critical Question
How can we protect data that must be continuously processed, transformed, and shared across AI components without ever exposing it?
This challenge demands a fundamental paradigm shift. From the traditional Encrypt-Decrypt-Process-Repeat model, we must transition to a Process-While-Encrypted approach. This leads us to a cryptographic functions that enables computation on encrypted data, transforming the landscape of AI security.

The fundamental challenge of securing AI systems while maintaining their utility can be addressed through a paradigm shift in data processing. Our research demonstrates that Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) serves as the cornerstone of this solution, enabling computation on encrypted data without requiring decryption.
Homomorphic Encryption is a cryptographic technique that allows mathematical operations to be performed directly on encrypted data, ensuring end-to-end confidentiality, even as AI systems process sensitive information. When you decrypt the result, it's identical to what you would have gotten by performing the same operations on unencrypted data. This capability allows AI systems process sensitive information without ever seeing the actual data. Whether analysing medical records, financial transactions, or personal communications, the AI performs all computations on encrypted values while producing encrypted results that only authorized parties can decrypt.
This fundamentally redefines the security perimeter, moving beyond traditional "encrypt-decrypt-process" cycles to achieve a truly "process-while-encrypted" paradigm. Data remains in its encrypted state from initial ingestion through final output, eliminating critical exposure points that adversaries typically exploit.
FHE directly addresses the vulnerabilities identified by transforming the very nature of data handling within AI workflows. This ensures data privacy and integrity without compromising operational efficiency.
No more data leakage at processing points, as all computations occur directly on encrypted data.
Prompts and their responses are processed homomorphically, preventing direct manipulation or exfiltration.
Tool poisoning becomes ineffective as commands and outputs remain encrypted throughout execution.
Homomorphic operations inherently protect data from unauthorized modification or inference during computation.

Mirror's VectaX represents the practical implementation of FHE technology specifically designed for AI workloads. Our solution transforms theoretical cryptographic capabilities into a production-ready security framework that integrates seamlessly with existing AI infrastructure.


Data flow architecture comparing standard AI system components with their FHE enabled counterparts.

AI models operate on encrypted data throughout the entire pipeline from initial input through final output—never requiring decryption at any stage. This eliminates the traditional vulnerability windows where data exists in plaintext form across all ecosystem components.
FHE preserves full AI capabilities including training, inference, and real-time processing without performance degradation, ensuring security doesn't compromise operational efficiency. Mirror's VectaX achieves this through optimized homomorphic operations specifically designed for neural network computations and vector operations.
Data remains encrypted from source systems through AI processing to result delivery, reducing the vulnerable decryption points our research identified across the ecosystem. Only authorized endpoints with proper cryptographic keys can access the final decrypted results.
Each critical AI ecosystem component from agents and IP to vector databases and LLMs operates within its own encrypted domain while maintaining seamless interoperability through homomorphic computation protocols.

We stand at a pivotal moment. As AI adoption accelerates across industries, the attack chains we've documented—from prompt injection to credential harvesting and tool poisoning—create an expanding threat surface that only cryptographic solutions like FHE can effectively address. These vulnerabilities persist because traditional security operates on plaintext data, while FHE eliminates the exposure points entirely by maintaining encryption throughout all AI operations.
Our research reveals a critical juncture in AI security. The 87% data security gap, combined with 73-91% attack success rates across AI extensions, agents, and protocols, demonstrates that current security measures are fundamentally inadequate for the AI era. This vulnerability is compounded by a dangerous disconnect: while 77% of organizations believe their AI systems are secure, only 9% have implemented AI security across their AI infrastructure.
Foundation, Not Policies
Outsourcing security to AI third-party providers through trust policies leaves critical data exposure problems unresolved, requiring organizations to embed foundational security directly into their AI architecture.
Encryption Throughout
End-to-end encryption through FHE implementation needs to become the foundational standard for AI deployments, not an afterthought.
Implementation Readiness
With FHE now available as a proven solution, enterprises can finally secure their AI implementations against data breaches and protect the integrity of their AI-driven operations.
Mirror VectaX and similar FHE solutions offer a practical path to secure AI— one that maintains functionality while eliminating the critical vulnerabilities our research has exposed.
