When Safety Checks Become Privacy Risks: A Privacy-Preserving Paradigm for LLM Agent Safety Auditing
Yixiang Luo, Ziheng Ma, Ke Chang, Jian Wang, Jiqiang Liu
Abstract
Large language model agents interact with online services through tool calls that may access private data or perform sensitive actions. Specialized providers can supply and maintain pre-execution safety auditing capabilities for agent operators. However, sending task descriptions, call arguments, and interaction histories to an external auditor may expose sensitive user information. In this work, we propose a paradigm for privacy-preserving safety auditing that separates delegated audit computation from plaintext access and execution authority. Grounded in a three-domain auditing model, the paradigm connects trusted representation construction, encrypted audit computation, and trusted decision and execution through explicit interfaces. These interfaces accommodate alternative representations and scorers, while encrypted computation protects audit inputs from a semi-honest auditor. We instantiate this paradigm in SealCall, a framework combining learned audit representations, CKKS-based encrypted similarity computation, and execution control bound to audited tool calls. Evaluated on 1,252 public binary candidates, SealCall achieves a mean F1 score of 0.840 under grouped nested evaluation, while preserving plaintext audit decisions in all measured cases. A representative configuration completes each encrypted scoring operation in 0.176 s.