An Empirical Case Study of Prompt Engineering Strategies for Bypassing Multi-Layer Agent Security Defenses

The OpenClaw Security Attack and Defense Challenge evaluates AI agent robustness through a three-stage defense pipeline: skill file scanning (Stage 1), instruction safety evaluation (Stage 2), and attack trajectory scoring (Stage 3). This paper presents an empirical case study of prompt engineering strategies against these layers across 19 attack targets in Enterprise OA, E-commerce, and Smart Home scenarios. I document both successful and failed strategies, with an emphasis on the observed trade-off between instruction safety (Stage 2) and attack execution accuracy (Stage 3). The final online score is 0.2630, with 5 of 19 tasks achieving full bypass. The results suggest that multi-layer defenses, reinforced by built-in behavioral constraints, substantially limit what prompt engineering alone can achieve.