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Prompt injection attack, where an attacker injects a prompt into the original one, aiming to make an Large Language Model (LLM) follow the injected prompt to perform an attacker-chosen task, represent a critical security threat. Existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Zedian Shao , Hongbin Liu , Jaden Mu , Neil Zhenqiang Gong

Indirect prompt injection threatens LLM agents by embedding malicious instructions in external content, enabling unauthorized actions and data theft. LLM agents maintain working memory through their context window, which stores interaction…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ruoyao Wen , Hao Li , Chaowei Xiao , Ning Zhang

Large language model (LLM) based agents have recently attracted much attention from the research and industry communities. Compared with original LLMs, LLM-based agents are featured in their self-evolving capability, which is the basis for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Zeyu Zhang , Xiaohe Bo , Chen Ma , Rui Li , Xu Chen , Quanyu Dai , Jieming Zhu , Zhenhua Dong , Ji-Rong Wen

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly treated as stateless: once an interaction ends, no information is assumed to persist unless it is explicitly stored and re-supplied. We challenge this assumption by introducing implicit memory-the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ahmed Salem , Andrew Paverd , Sahar Abdelnabi

The pre-training of large language models (LLMs) relies on massive text datasets sourced from diverse and difficult-to-curate origins. Although membership inference attacks and hidden canaries have been explored to trace data usage, such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Wassim Bouaziz , Mathurin Videau , Nicolas Usunier , El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi

Large Language Model (LLM) agents use memory to learn from past interactions, enabling autonomous planning and decision-making in complex environments. However, this reliance on memory introduces a critical security risk: an adversary can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qianshan Wei , Tengchao Yang , Yaochen Wang , Xinfeng Li , Lijun Li , Zhenfei Yin , Yi Zhan , Thorsten Holz , Zhiqiang Lin , XiaoFeng Wang

Autonomous web navigation agents, which translate natural language instructions into sequences of browser actions, are increasingly deployed for complex tasks across e-commerce, information retrieval, and content discovery. Due to the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Atharv Singh Patlan , Ashwin Hebbar , Pramod Viswanath , Prateek Mittal

The lifecycle of large language models (LLMs) is far more complex than that of traditional machine learning models, involving multiple training stages, diverse data sources, and varied inference methods. While prior research on data…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Pengfei He , Yue Xing , Han Xu , Zhen Xiang , Jiliang Tang

Conversational assistants are increasingly integrating long-term memory with large language models (LLMs). This persistence of memories, e.g., the user is vegetarian, can enhance personalization in future conversations. However, the same…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sidharth Pulipaka , Oliver Chen , Manas Sharma , Taaha S Bajwa , Vyas Raina , Ivaxi Sheth

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked significant achievements in language processing and reasoning capabilities. Despite their advancements, LLMs face vulnerabilities to data poisoning attacks, where the adversary inserts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xiangyu Zhou , Yao Qiang , Saleh Zare Zade , Mohammad Amin Roshani , Prashant Khanduri , Douglas Zytko , Dongxiao Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Growing applications of large language models (LLMs) trained by a third party raise serious concerns on the security vulnerability of LLMs.It has been demonstrated that malicious actors can covertly exploit these vulnerabilities in LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Shuli Jiang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Ling Cai , Nathalie Baracaldo

Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents excel at diverse tasks, yet they suffer from brittle procedural memory that is manually engineered or entangled in static parameters. In this work, we investigate strategies to endow agents with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Runnan Fang , Yuan Liang , Xiaobin Wang , Jialong Wu , Shuofei Qiao , Pengjun Xie , Fei Huang , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zedian Shao , Charles Fleming , Teodora Baluta

Memory systems enable otherwise-stateless LLM agents to persist user information across sessions, but also introduce a new attack surface. We characterize the Trojan Hippo attack, a class of persistent memory attacks that operates in a more…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Debeshee Das , Julien Piet , Darya Kaviani , Luca Beurer-Kellner , Florian Tramèr , David Wagner

Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, where malicious training examples embed hidden behaviours triggered by specific input patterns. However, most existing works assume a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Sanhanat Sivapiromrat , Caiqi Zhang , Marco Basaldella , Nigel Collier

Memory is a critical component in large language model (LLM)-based agents, enabling them to store and retrieve past executions to improve task performance over time. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on how memory management…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zidi Xiong , Yuping Lin , Wenya Xie , Pengfei He , Zirui Liu , Jiliang Tang , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Zhen Xiang

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have become increasingly prevalent across various real-world applications. They enhance decision-making by storing private user-agent interactions in the memory module for demonstrations, introducing new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Bo Wang , Weiyi He , Shenglai Zeng , Zhen Xiang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Pengfei He

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into the scientific peer-review process, raising new questions about their reliability and resilience to manipulation. In this work, we investigate the potential for hidden…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Matteo Gioele Collu , Umberto Salviati , Roberto Confalonieri , Mauro Conti , Giovanni Apruzzese

Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in a wide range of complex, real-world applications. However, LLM agents with a compromised memory bank may easily produce harmful outputs when the past…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Shen Dong , Shaochen Xu , Pengfei He , Yige Li , Jiliang Tang , Tianming Liu , Hui Liu , Zhen Xiang