MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoning
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-driven agents are capable of selecting external tools to complete users' tasks. However, attackers could compromise such process, steering agents toward inappropriate/wrong tools and enabling malicious actions. Most existing attacks primarily manipulate the tool metadata, which is easily detectable by auditing and may lose effectiveness as modern agents increasingly adopt memory modules to refine tool selection policies through accumulated experience. This paper proposes MemMorph, the first attack that bias tool selection by poisoning the agent's long-term memory. Rather than explicitly dictating the tool invocation decision, MemMorph injects a small number of crafted records that are disguised as technical facts, incident reports, and operational policies. These poisoned records reshape the agent's contextual perception and decision-making process, leading it to autonomously infer and select the tool preferred by the attacker. Experiments across 3 benchmarks, 10 agent backbones, and 3 memory-module implementations show that MemMorph achieves up to 85.9% attack success rate with only three injected records, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 25% while retaining potency under 3 representative defenses. Our findings expose long-term memory as a critical and under-explored attack surface in tool-augmented agents, urging the development of memory-level integrity safeguards.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 18 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 May 2026.
Builds on
18 of 26 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit9 Jan
- 2025Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agents28 Apr
- 2025Memory Injection Attacks on LLM Agents via Query-Only Interaction5 Mar
- 2024From Allies to Adversaries: Manipulating LLM Tool-Calling through Adversarial Injection13 Dec
Other references · 14
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,243
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
- 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
- 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
- 2020MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformerscited by 1,414
- 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
- 2022Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-trainingcited by 1,216
- 2021Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learningcited by 1,203
- 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,124
- 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 556
2 more
- 2023Detecting Language Model Attacks with Perplexitycited by 411
- 2022News Summarization and Evaluation in the Era of GPT-3cited by 324
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026Securing LLM-Agent Long-Term Memory Against Poisoning: Non-Malleable, Origin-Bound Authority with Machine-Checked Guaranteescited by 14
- 2026When Memory Becomes Authority: Benchmarking Authority Collapse at the Memory Consolidation Boundarycited by 6
- 2026Forensic Trajectory Signatures for Agent Memory Poisoning Detectioncited by 2
- 2026MemSecBench: Tracking Agent Memory Poisoning from Persistence to Consequence and Repaircited by 2
- 2026Authorization Before Context: A Model-Neutral Audience Boundary Against Cross-Audience Memory Leakage in Agentic Systemscited by 1
- 2026Compositional Threat Analysis of Latent Compromise in LLM Agent Systems: The Order 66 Scenariocited by 0
- 2026Transferable End-to-End Optimization for Indirect Long-Term Memory Poisoning in LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agents27 Sep 2026
- 2026Transferable End-to-End Optimization for Indirect Long-Term Memory Poisoning in LLM Agents1 Sep 2026
- 2026Authorization Before Context: A Model-Neutral Audience Boundary Against Cross-Audience Memory Leakage in Agentic Systems17 Aug 2026
- 2026Compositional Threat Analysis of Latent Compromise in LLM Agent Systems: The Order 66 Scenario8 Aug 2026
- 2026When Memory Becomes Authority: Benchmarking Authority Collapse at the Memory Consolidation Boundary3 Aug 2026
- 2026MemSecBench: Tracking Agent Memory Poisoning from Persistence to Consequence and Repair29 Jul 2026
- 2026Forensic Trajectory Signatures for Agent Memory Poisoning Detection29 Jun 2026
- 2026Securing LLM-Agent Long-Term Memory Against Poisoning: Non-Malleable, Origin-Bound Authority with Machine-Checked Guarantees23 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025MindGuard: Intrinsic Decision Inspection for Securing LLM Agents Against Metadata Poisoning
- 2026From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agents
- 2026AgentSys: Secure and Dynamic LLM Agents Through Explicit Hierarchical Memory Management
- 2026Think Twice Before You Act: Protecting LLM Agents Against Tool Description Poisoning via Isolated Planning
- 2025A-MemGuard: A Proactive Defense Framework for LLM-Based Agent Memory
- 2025ToolTweak: An Attack on Tool Selection in LLM-based Agents
- 2026ChainFuzzer: Greybox Fuzzing for Workflow-Level Multi-Tool Vulnerabilities in LLM Agents
- 2026Memory-Induced Tool-Drift in LLM Agents