Despite their growing adoption across domains, large language model
(LLM)-powered agents face significant security risks from backdoor attacks
during training and fine-tuning. These compromised agents can subsequently be
manipulated to execute malicious operations when presented with specific
triggers in their inputs or environments. To address this pressing risk, we
present ReAgent, a novel defense against a range of backdoor attacks on
LLM-based agents. Intuitively, backdoor attacks often result in inconsistencies
among the user's instruction, the agent's planning, and its execution. Drawing
on this insight, ReAgent employs a two-level approach to detect potential
backdoors. At the execution level, ReAgent verifies consistency between the
agent's thoughts and actions; at the planning level, ReAgent leverages the
agent's capability to reconstruct the instruction based on its thought
trajectory, checking for consistency between the reconstructed instruction and
the user's instruction. Extensive evaluation demonstrates ReAgent's
effectiveness against various backdoor attacks across tasks. For instance,
ReAgent reduces the attack success rate by up to 90\% in database operation
tasks, outperforming existing defenses by large margins. This work reveals the
potential of utilizing compromised agents themselves to mitigate backdoor
risks.