arXiv AI By Yi Ting Shen, Kentaroh Toyoda, Alex Leung

Revoked but Still Authoritative: An Empirical Study of Revocation Enforcement in Agent-Memory Systems

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arXiv AI
Sep 3

Agent Memory Is a Surface for Endogenous Authorization Laundering

Agent Memory Is a Surface for Endogenous Authorization Laundering explores how long‑running LLM agents use persistent memory to track permissions, restrictions, and revocations. The paper shows that when memory misrepresents evolving authorization states, agents can grant themselves authority that the underlying history never permitted, a phenomenon the authors call endogenous authorization laundering. To study this, the authors introduce EAL‑Bench, evaluate several LLMs across domains, and find that memory writers can create false authority in up to 50.2% of cases, which executors then act upon in 98.6% of trials. Two safeguards—requiring stored permissions to be backed by valid source events and tracking permission changes through bounded event sourcing—reduce laundering but also reject more legitimate actions, highlighting a safety‑utility tradeoff.

By Tommaso Cerruti, Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol