arXiv Machine Learning

Combining Long-Term Memory and LLMs Comes at a High Cost: From Prompt Injection to Persistent Compromise

The paper investigates a new vulnerability called memory injection, where malicious prompts can persist across sessions in modern LLM‑as‑a‑service platforms. By demonstrating that all NIST attack goals can be achieved on ChatGPT Instant 5.3, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3 Flash, the authors show that these services can spread disinformation, generate harmful content, or cause offline unresponsiveness even in fresh sessions. The study also reveals that many proposed defenses are not yet implemented and provides datasets and artifacts for further research.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

What If Prompt Injection Never Left? Exploring Cross-Session Stored Prompt Injection in Agentic Systems

arXiv:2606. 04425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern agentic systems transform LLMs from session-bounded assistants into stateful systems that persist and evolve shared world state across sessions through memories, filesystems, tools, and other long-lived contextual artifacts.

By Yuanbo Xie, Tianyun Liu, Yingjie Zhang, Suchen Liu, Yulin Li, Liya Su, Tingwen Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 7

When Claws Remember but Do Not Tell: Stealthy Memory Injection in Persistent Personal Agents

arXiv:2607. 05189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistent personal agents combine long-term memory with access to users' external environments, enabling personalized foreground assistance and proactive background execution.

By Yechao Zhang, Shiqian Zhao, Jiawen Zhang, Jie Zhang, Gelei Deng, Xiaogeng Liu, Chaowei Xiao, Tianwei Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Safeguarding LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Threats via Shadow Memory

The paper introduces ShadowMem, a defensive framework that protects large language model agents from long-horizon threats by maintaining a dedicated safety-focused memory. Inspired by the shadow stack concept, ShadowMem stores safety-critical context throughout an agent’s execution and uses this shadow memory to evaluate the risk of upcoming actions before they are carried out. Experiments show that ShadowMem outperforms existing defenses in detection accuracy, detects most attacks early, and adds minimal overhead to agent performance.

By Yuhui Wang, Tanqiu Jiang, Jiacheng Liang, Charles Fleming, Ting Wang