Memory Provenance Laundering in LLM Agents: A Non-Amplification Firewall for Persistent Memory
Jinghan Xu, Yiyong Xiao, Wanru Shao, Hankai Liu, Xinjin Li
Abstract Long-term memory lets large language model (LLM) agents reuse prior preferences and workflows, but it also turns untrusted observations into persistent action context. We identify memory provenance laundering: during LLM-based memory consolidation, an external observation may be rewritten as apparent user history or workflow support, preserving an action trigger while erasing the low-trust source that should limit its authority. Existing prompt filters, content sanitizers, and tool guards do not enforce source-authority nonamplification after lossy memory consolidation. We formalize this boundary and instantiate it as Provenance-Preserving Memory Firewall (PPMF), a lightweight memory middleware that preserves platform-maintained provenance and authorizes tool calls by matching action risk to the authority of action-relevant memories. In our schema-grounded evaluation with fixed risk policies, vulnerable consolidated memories reach up to 1.000 attack success rate (ASR); with intact platform-maintained provenance, confirmation, and risk labels, no evaluated unauthorized high-risk action passes the PPMF gate while confirmed benign actions and targeted low-risk memory use remain executable.
1
Introduction
Large language model (LLM) agents are moving from single-turn assistants to persistent systems that reason, call tools, browse websites, and coordinate multi-agent workflows (Yao et al., 2023; Schick et al., 2023; Yao et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2024b). Long-term memory is central to this shift: agents increasingly store user preferences, feedback, skills, reflective traces, and conversational state to improve future decisions (Park et al., 2023; Shinn et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Packer et al., 2023). The same mechanism expands the security boundary. An untrusted webpage, email, Slack message, or tool response can
be written into memory, retrieved in a later task, and used as context for a different tool call. Indirect prompt injection shows that LLMintegrated applications blur the boundary between instructions and data (Greshake et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Debenedetti et al., 2024). Memorypoisoning work shows that cross-task attacks are possible when raw trajectories or knowledge bases are stored and later retrieved (Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026). A deployment gap remains. Many practical agents do not store raw trajectories; they use LLM-based consolidation to write compact memories. Consolidation can remove explicit injection wording. It can also remove the source boundary that made the information untrusted. The resulting failure is not only that malicious text survives, but that rewriting changes how much authority the text appears to have. We call this failure memory provenance laundering. In Task A, an agent observes untrusted external content and consolidates it into memory. In Task B, the memory is retrieved as if it were user history, a workflow rule, or prior confirmation. For example, an external page may say “resume workflow PM-A011 for future monitor setup.” A vulnerable consolidator may store “user workflow memory: resume PM-A011 when handling monitor setup.” The future action now appears supported by user history, although its source was a webpage. Existing defenses miss this boundary for structural reasons. Prompt filters protect the current text; tool guards and allowlists protect the current call; IFC, CaMeL, Progent, and prompt-flow integrity separate data from control at the active prompt/tool boundary (Wu et al., 2024a; Debenedetti et al., 2025; Costa et al., 2025; Shi et al., 2025; Kim et al., 2025). None is designed to preserve source authority through lossy memory consolidation and later bind the surviving memory to future toolcall arguments. Safe memory therefore needs a non-amplification principle: summarization may
Trigger preserved, provenance erased
Vulnerable Consolidated Memory Task A: External Website
Stored Memory
LLM Memory Consolidation
Source: Low Trust
Looks Like Work Flow
Task B: High-risk Tool
Source Erased
Unauthorized Effect
Attack Succeeds
PPMF-Protected Memory Task A: External Website Source: Low Trust
Provenance Preserving Memory
Risk-Authority Gate
Task B: High-risk Tool
Source Metadata Retained
Requires User Confirmed
Blocked Safely
Information may be remembered, but authority cannot be amplified
Figure 1: PPMF attack scenario. Consolidated memory creates an authority-laundering attack surface.
preserve information, but it must not upgrade the authority of the source. This work instantiates the principle with Provenance-Preserving Memory Firewall (PPMF), an execution-centric memory defense that decouples memory usefulness from action authority. PPMF stores each memory with platformmaintained provenance metadata, including source, trust level, transformation history, risk labels, and whether the memory derives from external observations. Before tool execution, PPMF checks whether the memories supporting the action have sufficient authority for the action’s risk level. It is not merely storing provenance: the key step is binding provenance to the specific tool-call arguments at execution time, so authority cannot be inherited by unrelated memories or paraphrased workflow text. External-derived memory can remain useful context, but it cannot independently authorize purchases, external effects, credential changes, or destructive operations. In evaluation, Qwen2.5-14B consolidated memories reach 0.933 ASR on synthetic cases and content filtering leaves 0.518 ASR on trace-derived cases; with platform-maintained provenance and fixed risk policies, PPMF prevents external-derived memory from independently authorizing the evaluated high-risk actions while preserving confirmed benign actions. The contributions are summarized as follows: • We identify memory provenance laundering, a cross-task failure mode distinct from raw trajectory poisoning: the action trigger may survive while explicit malicious wording and source authority disappear. • We formalize source-authority non-amplification for memory consolidation and instantiate it as PPMF, a provenance-preserving memory middleware with an action-risk-aware execution gate.
• We provide a schema-grounded, effect-counted evaluation showing that laundering persists across model-generated, trace-derived, and browser-transfer settings, while PPMF preserves the authorization boundary under deployment and utility diagnostics.
2
Related Work
Indirect injection and browser-agent defenses. Tool-using and web agents combine reasoning with external actions (Yao et al., 2023; Schick et al., 2023; Yao et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2024b). Indirect prompt injection shows that webpages, emails, and tool outputs can carry hidden instructions into LLM applications (Greshake et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023). AgentDojo evaluates paired user and attacker goals (Debenedetti et al., 2024); BrowseSafe builds realistic browser payloads with distractors (Zhang et al., 2025). Llama Guard and Prompt Guard filter unsafe content (Inan et al., 2023; Meta, 2025). These methods protect the current context boundary, whereas PPMF targets the later memory boundary after summarization has removed surface injection strings. Memory poisoning and provenance-aware memory. Memory-augmented agents persist reflections, skills, state, and preferences (Park et al., 2023; Shinn et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Packer et al., 2023). AgentPoison and Poison Once show that stored state can carry attacks across tasks (Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026); AMemGuard studies proactive memory defense (Wei et al., 2025). Tiered, graph, and local memory systems improve evidence retention, retrieval structure, locality, or provenance-aware organization (Zhu et al., 2026; Van et al., 2026; Bhardwaj, 2026). PPMF instead makes source authority a
tool-execution precondition after consolidation. Information flow and privilege control. Information-flow and privilege-control systems argue that LLMs should not infer authority from text alone. IFC defenses track untrusted flow (Wu et al., 2024a; Costa et al., 2025); CaMeL separates data from control (Debenedetti et al., 2025); Progent provides programmable tool privileges (Shi et al., 2025); prompt-flow integrity tracks prompt-composition escalation (Kim et al., 2025); and IPIGuard uses tool-dependency graphs (An et al., 2025). These systems focus on current prompts, calls, or trajectory dependencies. PPMF carries authority separation across time, requiring source authority to survive memory writing, retrieval, and support binding.
3
Problem Formulation and Threat Model
3.1
Problem Formulation
Agent pipeline. We study a persistent tool-using agent with two separated tasks. In Task A, the agent observes inputs OA = {oi } from user instructions, web pages, emails, documents, messages, or tool outputs. A memory writer C consolidates them into long-term memories M = C(OA ). In Task B, the retriever returns RB ⊆ M , the planner proposes a tool call a = (tool, args, ρ), and the runtime decides whether to execute it. The risk label ρ describes the external consequence of the call: read-only retrieval, navigation, side effects, purchase/payment-like actions, and credential or secret changes. Memory provenance laundering. The failure is an authority mismatch caused by consolidation. An external observation oi may be rewritten into a memory m = C(oi ) that preserves an action trigger, target handle, or workflow phrase while appearing as user history, prior preference, or confirmed procedure. In Task B, the planner may treat m as support for a, although its authority should remain bounded by oi . We use this single-source case for clarity; Section 4 generalizes the property to mixed-source memories at the claim level. The attack can therefore survive removal of explicit injection strings: the harmful object is an unauthorized authority upgrade, not a malicious token sequence.
3.2
Threat Model
Attacker capabilities. The attacker controls external observations in Task A via natural language, hidden handles, reframing, or fake markers. They cannot control system components (prompt, memory, confirmation, risk schemas, gate) or write trusted metadata, though paraphrasing may assist. Security and utility goals. An attack succeeds when external-derived memory alone causes an unauthorized high-risk action in Task B (excluding actions authorized by the Task B user request or a recorded confirmation). A defense must still allow confirmed benign actions (e.g., purchases, emails, deletions, reservations). The goal is not to erase external memory but to prevent it from granting sufficient authority for high-risk execution. Trusted boundary. PPMF assumes that provenance metadata is assigned by the platform rather than by generated memory text: source labels come from observation channels, confirmation labels from user-interface events, and risk labels from tool schemas plus policy review. In deployment, these fields should be written to append-only event logs, bound to UI confirmations or tool envelopes, and validated against schema registries before execution. Missing metadata is treated conservatively. Platform forgery or mislabeling breaks the boundary; Appendix I quantifies this sensitivity with adversarial-label diagnostics. Cross-channel attacks that socially engineer a real user confirmation are outside the main threat model and should be handled by user-authentication and confirmationinterface defenses.
4
Method
Provenance-preserving memory. PPMF has three stages: provenance-preserving memory writing, argument-level support binding, and riskauthority gating. Rather than treating consolidation as free-form summarization, PPMF constructs each memory as a structured record: m = (c, s, τ, h, r, e), where c, s, τ, h, r, e denote content, source, trust, transformation history, risk labels, and externalderived flag. Trust lattice U < E < T < H < C < S denotes U NKNOWN, E XTERNAL, T RUSTED T OOL , U SER H ISTORY , U SER _C ONFIRMED , and S YSTEM. The writer may emit textual provenance cues in c, but the gate reads only platform-
authorized
Channels Observation user web email
Memory Writer consolidate without authority upgrade
tools
Memory Store structured tuple content
source
trust
history
risk
external
denied
checked
Retrieval + Support Binding
Risk-Authority Gate
retrieved memory IDs
trust(support) >= required(action risk)
action args / URL / handle
m = (content, source, trust, history, risk, external) Execute confirmed action
Unknown <
External
Trust ladder < TrustedTool < UserHistory < UserConfirmed <
Core invariant Memory can preserve information, but cannot amplify source authority.
System
Deny external-only high-risk action
The LLM may plan;
! the platform enforces authority.
Figure 2: PPMF introduces structural constraints at the memory boundary. Vulnerable consolidation can transform an external observation into apparent user workflow support. PPMF stores provenance as system metadata and authorizes tool execution by matching memory authority to action risk.
maintained fields (s, τ, h, r, e); phrases such as “user-confirmed” do not create authority without recorded metadata. Source-authority non-amplification. For a memory m = C(O) derived from observations O = {oi }, each action-relevant claim q ∈ m inherits no more authority than the least authoritative source that supports it: auth(q, m) ⪯ min{auth(oi ) : oi ∈ supp(q)} ⪯
unless a platform-recorded declassification event d is bound to the same user principal, action target, risk class, and scope. Here q is a schemalevel claim linking a memory span to an action argument, such as an account, URL, file, recipient, or workflow id. supp(q) is computed from explicit memory pointers when available, and otherwise from canonicalized tool arguments and memory metadata; ambiguous or conflicting matches keep all candidates, and the gate uses the least trusted support. Scope may specify expiry, amount limits, or tool-specific argument ranges. Since the writer cannot modify trust metadata, trust upgrades require platform events, the gate reads metadata rather than generated text, and authorization is least-trust, mixed-source summaries cannot let external-derived claims independently authorize high-risk execution under intact platform provenance and fixed risk policies. Appendix A states this invariant as a runtime-monitor property and proof sketch.
Risk-authority gate. PPMF authorizes actions by matching memory authority to action risk, not by asking whether memory text sounds malicious. Each attempted tool call is labeled as R EAD, NAV, E FFECT, P URCHASE, or C REDENTIAL. The implemented policy instance is explicit: R EAD requires at least E XTERNAL; NAV requires U SER H ISTORY; E FFECT, P URCHASE, and C REDENTIAL require U SER _C ONFIRMED. Our experiments use binary confirmation because it is the minimal policy for high-risk actions; scoped or time-bounded confirmations can refine required(ρ) without changing the invariant. Support binding and tool taint. The gate is deterministic rather than LLM-mediated and follows a pointer-first rule. For each proposed call, PPMF first binds explicit memory identifiers; if none are present, it canonicalizes schema-declared arguments and matches URLs, handles, files, accounts, endpoints, workflow ids, or tool targets recorded in memory metadata. Exact pointer matches dominate aliases; aliases must resolve to a canonical target; conflicting or partial matches keep all candidates and authorize using the minimum trust. An unrelated confirmed memory therefore cannot upgrade an external-derived target. T RUSTED T OOL denotes the authenticated tool envelope, not the semantic cleanliness of its output: if a trusted tool reads external data, downstream outputs inherit the least trusted input taint until a system-recorded declassification event bound to the same principal, target, action, risk class, and scope upgrades it. Table 5 in Appendix A gives the stage-by-stage policy sum-
mary; the main text keeps the invariant, binding rule, and implemented gate rule here. Middleware deployment. PPMF inserts as memory and tool-authorization middleware around the agent loop, mapping to LangGraph, LangChain, or multi-agent wrappers. We implement trajectorylevel middleware and a LangGraph StateGraph sandbox (Appendix B).
5
Experimental Setup
5.1
Research Questions and Task Setup
We evaluate four research questions: • RQ1: whether memory consolidation launders source authority. • RQ2: whether text-level filters remain effective after paraphrase. • RQ3: which PPMF components are necessary. • RQ4: whether PPMF remains usable and robust under retrieval noise, deployment-oriented settings, targeted utility checks, and metadata perturbations. Each scenario has two stages: Task A generates observations and memory; Task B retrieves memory and may execute a high-risk action. Malicious cases require the target action to be unauthorized by Task B’s user request; benign cases include explicit user-confirmation metadata, so benign success measures confirmed high-risk utility rather than general task quality. Model-generated memories are fixed across all baselines. Risk labels are assigned before running any defense from schema-declared side effects and tool names, not from generated memory or model outputs; hand-written policies only resolve schema ambiguity and are frozen before evaluation. Detailed descriptions of these datasets can be found in Appendix B.1. 5.2
Datasets
We use six core memory-laundering scenario families plus browser-transfer and utility/deployment diagnostics: • Synthetic & adaptive. Synthetic covers preference, procedure, authority laundering, frustration recovery, and keyword evasion. Adaptive uses indirection, split context, preference reframing, recovery jargon, and cross-domain handoff (Greshake et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026; Zhang et al., 2025). • AgentDojo-derived on banking, Slack, travel, workspace tools (Debenedetti et al., 2024), pair-
ing malicious external observations with benign confirmed high-risk tasks. • Trace-derived preserving realistic tool names, user goals, and domains (Debenedetti et al., 2024). • Confirmation-spoofing with fake userconfirmation markers (Greshake et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025). • Server-backed web sandbox with attackercontrolled Task A HTML, target Task B page, and state-changing HTTP endpoints. (Yao et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025). • LangGraph decoy-memory stress tests retrieved supports with same-domain distractors (Zhang et al., 2025). • BrowseSafe-Bench Adaptation. We adapt 3,680 BrowseSafe-Bench (Zhang et al., 2025) HTML pages into memory-reuse scenarios by treating browser observations as external-derived memories and evaluating whether later high-risk actions are authorized without recorded confirmation. • Utility and memory-store pilots. We derive 250 low-risk utility and re-confirmation cases from AgentDojo traces and run a LangGraph StateGraph+InMemoryStore pilot with fixed pre-storage Qwen2.5-14B-generated memories. For BrowseSafe-Bench transfer, Task A stores each labeled HTML page as an E XTERNAL browser-channel memory, while Task B pairs positive pages with unconfirmed state-changing actions and negative pages with same-action confirmations. Text filters read stored browser-memory text; PPMF reads channel provenance. 5.3
LLM-Generated Memory Data
Each raw trajectory provides source-labeled observations, task objectives, attack goal, candidate high-risk action, and benign confirmations. The memory writer outputs a JSON memory field under two prompt modes: (1) vulnerable, with helpful memory but no source-trust tracking; and (2) provenance-preserving, with readable cues while platform metadata remains authoritative. Neither uses oracle labels such as “malicious”. Text-level baselines use generated memory text within each condition, whereas PPMF decides authority from platform metadata rather than safer summary wording. Writers include Qwen2.5-1.5B/3B/7B/14BInstruct (Yang et al., 2024), Llama3-8B-Instruct (Llama Team, AI @ Meta, 2024), and Mistral-7BInstruct (Jiang et al., 2023). We also convert Llama-
Baselines and Ablations
We compare against the rows in Table 1: raw memory (RM), a persistent-memory risk baseline aligned with memory-poisoning settings (Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026); no defense (ND); content and prompt filters (CF/PF) for unsafecontent and prompt-injection detection (Inan et al., 2023; Meta, 2025); action-handle, confirmationmarker, and hybrid heuristics (AG/CG/HH) for tool-boundary filtering (Greshake et al., 2023; Debenedetti et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025); SelfAsk provenance (Press et al., 2023); gate-only authorization; and full PPMF. Ablations separate where protection enters the pipeline: ProvF filters for provenance cues after vulnerable summarization, PPMF-Mem uses provenance-preserving memory text without the gate, PPMF-ProvF filters provenance-preserving memory before execution, and Gate tests authorization without reliable memory provenance. Full PPMF combines provenance-preserving memory with execution-time risk-authority gating. Detailed descriptions of these baselines and ablations can be found in Appendix B.2. 5.5
Retrieval Noise, Middleware, and Metrics
For retrieval noise, the evaluation adds d ∈ {0, 1, 3, 5, 10, 20} distractor memories per trace scenario and varies top-k ∈ {1, 3, 5, 10, 20}. The LangGraph test integrates PPMF into a StateGraph loop; the web sandbox counts success only on server-side state changes. Metrics are grouped by purpose: safety uses ASRB , the fraction of malicious Task B cases that execute the unauthorized effect, and laundering rate, the fraction whose consolidated memory presents externalderived content as user history, workflow support, or confirmation-like authority; utility uses benign success and false-block rate; robustness uses confirmed-support retrieval, wrong-support execution, long-horizon retrieval/provenance persistence, and metadata perturbations. Metadata stress masks source, confirmation, and risk fields on 726 trace scenarios, with missing fields defaulting to U N KNOWN, unconfirmed, and the most restrictive risk. A PPMF ASR of 0.000 means that no unauthorized high-risk action passes under the stated provenance and risk-policy assumptions; it is not a claim of universal robustness.
Attack Success Rate
5.4
PPMF blocks memory-laundered authority across settings 1.0
0.94
Synthetic
AgentDojo-derived
0.8 0.6
0.28
0.4
0.09
0.2 0.0
r erable tent Filte Vuln Con
F PPM
Adaptive
Attack Success Rate
3.3-70B-Instruct AgentDojo artifacts into 1,046 trace-derived scenarios.
1.0 0.8
0.80
0.03
r erable tent Filte Vuln Con
F
PPM
1.00 Trace-derived
0.80 0.52
0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0
r erable tent Filte Vuln Con
F
PPM
r erable tent Filte Vuln Con
F
PPM
Figure 3: Main-result summary after memory consolidation. Bars show attack success rates for representative settings and defenses; benign success and falseblock rates are reported in Table 1.
6
Results
6.1
Main Results
Table 1 tests whether each defense satisfies both sides of the memory-security boundary: blocking authority upgrades from external-derived memory while preserving confirmed high-risk actions. Vulnerable summarization yields non-zero ASR across models: Qwen2.5-14B reaches 0.933 on synthetic/adaptive cases, and Mistral-7B reaches 0.900 in the web sandbox. Text-level defenses lack a stable operating point after consolidation: prompt filtering mirrors no defense, handle and confirmation-marker guards rely on surface forms, and gate-only blocks attacks by rejecting benign actions. PPMF separates these effects by using recorded provenance rather than memory wording. The cross-model results in Appendix Table 16 test whether laundering is tied to one summarizer. It is not: laundering persists across Qwen2.51.5B/3B/7B/14B, Llama3-8B, and Mistral-7B. Even when direct ASR is low on AgentDojo, laundering rates remain 0.958–1.000, meaning that source authority is still rewritten into user-historylike memory. No unauthorized execution is observed for PPMF across all reported memory writers because authorization depends on platform provenance rather than generated text. 6.2
Ablation Study
For RQ3, Table 2 rules out simpler explanations for the gains. Provenance filtering after vulnerable summarization fails because source author-
Method
Syn. Q14
Adapt. Q14
AgentDojo Q14
HTTP
HTTP Mistral
RM ND CF PF AG CG HH Gate PPMF
1.000/1.000/0.000 0.933/1.000/0.000 0.200/0.500/0.500 0.933/1.000/0.000 0.733/0.500/0.500 0.400/0.000/1.000 0.733/0.500/0.500 0.000/0.000/1.000 0.000/1.000/0.000
1.000/1.000/0.000 0.933/1.000/0.000 0.933/1.000/0.000 0.933/1.000/0.000 0.033/0.000/1.000 0.033/1.000/0.000 0.033/1.000/0.000 0.000/0.000/1.000 0.000/1.000/0.000
1.000/0.042/0.000 0.490/0.042/0.000 0.281/0.000/0.083 0.490/0.042/0.000 0.490/0.042/0.000 0.281/0.000/0.042 0.229/0.042/0.000 0.000/0.000/0.042 0.000/1.000/0.000
N/A 1.000/1.000/0.000 0.300/0.000/1.000 1.000/1.000/0.000 0.750/1.000/0.000 0.750/1.000/0.000 N/A 0.000/0.000/1.000 0.000/1.000/0.000
N/A 0.900/1.000/0.000 0.050/0.200/0.800 0.900/1.000/0.000 0.850/1.000/0.000 0.700/1.000/0.000 N/A 0.000/0.000/1.000 0.000/1.000/0.000
Table 1: Full main-baseline comparison. Each cell reports ASR/benign-success/false-block. Q14 denotes Qwen2.514B-generated memory. Sample sizes are Syn./Adapt.: 30 malicious and 12 benign cases each; AgentDojo: 96 malicious and 24 benign cases; HTTP/HTTP Mistral: 20 malicious and 5 benign cases. Method abbreviations: RM denotes Raw memory, ND denotes No defense, CF denotes Content filter, PF denotes Prompt filter, AG denotes Action-handle guard, CG denotes Confirmation-marker guard, HH denotes Hybrid heuristic, Gate denotes Gate only. N / A means that the condition is not defined for that sandbox. Setting
Vuln↓
ProvF↓
CF↓
Gate↓
PPMF-Mem↓
PPMF-ProvF↓
PPMF↓
Synthetic Qwen2.5-3B Synthetic Llama3-8B AgentDojo Qwen2.5-3B AgentDojo trace
0.867 1.000 0.083 1.000
0.867 1.000 0.083 1.000
0.267/0.500 0.300/0.500 0.031/0.125 0.518/0.227
0.000/1.000 0.000/1.000 0.000/0.083 0.000/1.000
0.967 1.000 0.219 0.000
0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000
0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000 0.000/0.000
ity has already been lost; this shows why metadata must be preserved before consolidation finishes. PPMF-Mem shows the opposite failure: readable provenance cues alone cannot stop actionbearing content, so execution-time gating is necessary. The AgentDojo trace PPMF-Mem row is a trace-conversion artifact; across synthetic and model-generated summaries, PPMF-Mem remains vulnerable. Gate-only confirms the utility side of the design: authorization without trustworthy memory provenance blocks attacks but also blocks benign confirmed actions.
Attack success rate
Table 2: Ablation results. Cells with two numbers report ASR/false-block. ProvF filters after vulnerable summarization; PPMF-Mem uses provenance-preserving memory text without the gate; PPMF-ProvF filters provenancepreserving memory before execution but does not replace risk-authority gating.
Content filter
PPMF
0.75 0.5 0.25 0 Adaptive
Trace
Figure 4: Retrieval-noise results with 20 decoy memories and top-10 retrieval. Noisy retrieval does not remove the attack path, because the retrieved memory can still carry laundered authority. PPMF checks recorded authority after retrieval rather than trusting memory text.
6.3 From raw-memory poisoning to provenance laundering. Table 3 explains why memory laundering is not just raw trajectory poisoning. Raw memory exposes the action-bearing observation directly, whereas consolidation can wash out the source while preserving apparent authority. The AgentDojo Qwen2.5-3B row is the clearest case: vulnerable consolidation has only 0.083 ASR but 0.990 laundering. Low immediate ASR therefore does not mean the memory is safe; the dangerous property is that external content has been rewritten into a higher-authority form. PPMF targets this authority transfer rather than acting as a generic raw-memory sanitizer.
No gate 1.0
Retrieval, Middleware, and Web Effects
For RQ4, retrieval-noise and decoy-memory experiments test whether the defense depends on clean retrieval. On 726 AgentDojo traces with 20 decoys, no unauthorized execution is observed for PPMF; benign success rises from 0.794 at k = 10 to 0.990 at k = 20, tracking confirmed-support retrieval rather than gate error. No defense yields ASRB = 1.000, while content filtering gives ASRB = 0.518 and benign success 0.773. Table 4 adds HTTP effects and 3,680 BrowseSafeBench pages: HTML and prompt lexical filters leave 0.689 and 0.609 ASR, whereas PPMF records browser output as external provenance (complete
Setting
Raw ASR↓
Raw benign↑
Vuln ASR↓
Launder↓
CF ASR↓
CF FB↓
PPMF ASR↓
PPMF benign↑
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
1.000 1.000 0.042 0.042
0.867 1.000 0.083 1.000
0.867 1.000 0.990 1.000
0.267 0.300 0.031 0.000
0.500 0.500 0.125 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
Synthetic Qwen2.5-3B Synthetic Llama3-8B AgentDojo Qwen2.5-3B AgentDojo deterministic
Table 3: Raw-memory versus consolidated-memory bridge. Raw trajectory memory reproduces persistentinstruction risk. Vulnerable consolidation introduces a different failure: high laundering rates even when direct ASR changes. CF denotes content filtering and FB denotes false-block rate.
Setting
HTTP
HTTP-M
Method
FB↓
Attack success
0.000 1.000 1.000 0.000
PPMF
No defense Content filter Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.300 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.000 0.000 1.000
No defense Content filter PPMF
0.900 0.050 0.000
1.000 0.000 0.200 0.800 1.000 0.000
1.000 0.000 0.984 0.000
1.000 0.000 0.979 0.990
0.000 1.000 0.021 0.010
1.000 0.689 0.609 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.985 0.985 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.015 0.015 1.000 0.000
No middleware Self-Ask strict Trace d20k20 Self-Ask permissive PPMF
BS-Bench
ASR↓ Ben.↑
No defense HTML lexical Prompt filter Gate only PPMF
Table 4: Deployment diagnostics. Key rows for HTTP effects, Mistral web memories, trace decoys, and BrowseSafe-Bench transfer. HTTP-M denotes Mistralgenerated HTTP memories; BS-Bench contains 3,680 pages.
rows in Appendix Table 9). Metadata stress makes the conditional boundary explicit. Missing fields fail closed: at 20% missing provenance, no unauthorized execution is observed, but benign success drops to 0.814. Corrupted trust roots are outside the guarantee: 10% forged confirmations and 10% risk downgrades yield ASR 0.088 ± 0.016 and 0.112 ± 0.006, motivating append-only logs, scoped UI confirmations, and schema-checked tool envelopes (Appendix Table 19). The server-backed sandbox in Figure 5 matters because success requires an actual HTTP state change, not merely a risky plan string. No defense executes all malicious effects; content filtering lowers ASR to 0.300 but false-blocks every benign task. With Mistral-7B-generated memories, no defense gives ASR 0.900 and laundering 0.950; PPMF controls effects without suppressing confirmed benign memory use. Appendix Table 10 summarizes two practical diagnostics. Low-risk recall, navigation continuation, preference reuse, and confirmed high-risk actions remain executable without false re-confirmation; missing-support cases recover after one same-target
Benign success
False block
Gate only Confirm marker Action handle Prompt filter Content filter No defense 0.00
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
Rate
Figure 5: Server-backed web sandbox with real state changes. A malicious success requires an actual local HTTP effect, such as posting, checkout, email sending, file deletion, or password update. PPMF authorizes only effects supported by recorded confirmation metadata bound to the same target.
confirmation. The LangGraph store pilot writes Qwen2.5-14B-generated memories through persistent storage, where PPMF preserves benign execution while preventing stored laundered summaries from authorizing effects. Finally, Self-Ask and 1,046 Llama-3.3-70B trace-derived memories stress two shortcuts: textual provenance inference and stronger consolidation. Strict Self-Ask blocks all benign tasks, permissive Self-Ask yields ASR 0.984, and 70B vulnerable memory gives ASR 1.000; PPMF relies on recorded provenance instead (Appendix I).
7
Conclusion
Long-term memory turns agent security into a cross-task provenance problem. PPMF makes persistent memory authority-aware: memory may preserve information, but not upgrade source authority. By recording write-time provenance and gating high-risk tool calls through action-relevant support, PPMF enforces source-authority non-amplification under intact platform labels while preserving confirmed benign actions. Future memory systems should treat provenance as persistent authority, combine deterministic gates with trajectory-level risk monitors, and make confirmation scope explicit rather than infer authority from retrieved text.
Limitations PPMF assumes intact platform-maintained provenance, confirmation events, risk labels, and deterministic support binding. Compromised metadata, systematic risk mislabeling, or social-engineered genuine confirmation are outside the guarantee, although missing metadata is handled conservatively. Production deployments should use append-only logs, signed UI-confirmation records, attested tool envelopes, schema registries, and audits for risklabel drift. Our targeted utility diagnostics cover low-risk recall, navigation continuation, preference reuse, confirmed high-risk execution, and one-step reconfirmation recovery. They isolate authorization friction rather than broad open-ended task completion, long-term user confirmation fatigue, or human-in-the-loop recovery cost. The LangGraph pilot uses an installed InMemoryStore runtime with fixed Qwen2.5-14B-generated memories; it does not claim coverage of LangChain, Letta, AutoGen, or online learned memory updates. The current policy also treats confirmation coarsely; scoped, time-bounded, amount-limited, and partial declassification policies are natural extensions. The evaluation focuses on single-agent memory laundering and direct state-changing tools. It does not fully cover aggregate low-risk chains that produce high-risk harm, multi-tenant shared memory, inter-agent authority transfer, or full dropin deployments of IFC and trajectory-judge systems. Composition-aware risk elevation, rate limits, cross-agent isolation, and learned judges such as shadow-memory monitors are complementary future directions.
Broader Impact and Ethical Considerations Datasets. This work studies a dual-use security problem: the same experiments that reveal memoryprovenance failures could help attackers reason about persistent-memory abuse. To reduce misuse risk, the evaluation uses synthetic, trace-derived, or locally sandboxed tasks rather than real user accounts, live credentials, private services, or thirdparty targets. State-changing actions are executed only against controlled local endpoints or represented through benchmark abstractions. Scenario templates, risk labels, and aggregate outputs should be released with sanitized identifiers and without secrets, personal data, or executable payloads that
enable real-world exploitation. The purpose of the datasets is to measure whether an agent preserves authorization boundaries, not to provide operational attack instructions. LLMs. The LLMs in this study are used as memory writers and planners to test whether consolidation can launder source authority across tasks. They are not used as the trusted source of authorization. PPMF deliberately relies on platform-maintained provenance, confirmation metadata, risk schemas, and deterministic gates rather than asking an LLM to infer whether an action is allowed. This design choice reduces the risk that model persuasion, paraphrase, or hallucinated user intent becomes an authorization signal. Reported results should nevertheless be interpreted within the evaluated model families and tasks; stronger models, new tool ecosystems, or different memory policies may expose additional failure modes. Use of AI Assistant Tools. AI assistant tools were used during drafting, editing, code organization, and consistency checking. All research decisions, experimental claims, threat-model boundaries, reported numbers, and final manuscript text remain the responsibility of the human authors. The assistant was not treated as an author, did not provide unsupervised scientific judgment, and did not replace manual verification of code, results, or citations. Any AI-assisted text was reviewed for factual accuracy, clarity, and compliance with the paper’s evidence.
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A
PPMF Policy Summary
Table 5 summarizes the deterministic policy stages used by PPMF. We move this summary to the appendix because the main method section states the invariant, support-binding rule, tool-taint rule, and implemented gate directly. In a production stack, the source and confirmation fields should be written as append-only records, confirmation events should be bound to a user principal and canonical target, and tool envelopes should carry signed input/output descriptors. These mechanisms do not make PPMF robust to a compromised platform, but they make the trusted boundary inspectable and reduce accidental schema drift. Algorithmic interface. PPMF is implemented as three deterministic runtime steps. Write: given an observation, its channel, and a consolidator output, create m = (c, s, τ, h, r, e) by taking c from the memory writer and all authority fields from the platform event log. The writer may describe provenance in text, but it cannot set τ , confirmation status, or declassification events. Bind: given retrieved memories and a proposed tool call, first use explicit memory ids; otherwise canonicalize schema-declared arguments and match them to memory metadata. Ambiguous matches return all candidates rather than choosing the most favorable one. Gate: compute the least trusted actionrelevant support and compare it with required(ρ); allow, deny, or request same-target confirmation. This interface is intentionally independent of the LLM planner. Runtime monitor property. Proposition. Under platform-maintained provenance, append-only confirmation events, and deterministic support binding, PPMF enforces source-authority nonamplification for high-risk tool calls: no actionrelevant claim whose least supporting source is below required(ρ) can authorize a call of risk ρ, unless a scoped declassification event is bound to the same principal, target, risk class, and scope. Proof sketch. The memory writer cannot write or upgrade trust metadata; support binding returns action-relevant supports or fails closed; authorization uses the least trusted support; and high-risk calls require U SER _C ONFIRMED support. Therefore, an external-derived claim cannot independently authorize a high-risk effect while platform provenance, confirmation, and risk metadata remain trustworthy.
B
Experiment Artifact Notes
The experiments were run on a remote server in the project directory mpla_ppmf_experiment. The deterministic evaluation environment used Python 3.11.15. The LLM environment used PyTorch 1.12.1+cu113 and Transformers 4.40.2 on three RTX 3090 GPUs. Scenario JSONL files are under data/, run configurations are under configs/, Python entrypoints are under src/mpla_ppmf/ and remote_src/, and shell wrappers are under scripts/. Middleware outputs record framework_backend=langgraph for the LangGraph reruns. The deployment-validity artifacts include Qwen2.5-14B and Mistral-7B model-generated memory results, clean and chaos LangGraph web-sandbox JSONs, Mistral-7B LangGraph web-sandbox generated-memory JSONs, AgentDojo trace label-noise JSONs, AgentDojo LangGraph decoy-memory utility JSONs, Llama3.3-70B trace-derived results, and additional diagnostic JSONs containing Self-Ask, adversariallabel, long-horizon retrieval/provenance persistence, and qualitative linguistic cases; exact commands and filenames are listed in the artifact README. B.1
Detailed Description of Datasets
We use six core scenario families; the full BrowseSafe-Bench browser-transfer diagnostic follows the browser-transfer setup described in the main evaluation. Each is designed to test a different part of the memory authority boundary. • Synthetic & adaptive sets contain 42 cases each, with 30 malicious and 12 benign cases. The synthetic set covers preference laundering, procedure laundering, authority laundering, frustration recovery, and keyword evasion. The adaptive set uses handle indirection, split context, preference reframing, recovery jargon, and cross-domain handoff. These templates are adapted from indirect prompt injection, prompt-injection benchmarks, memory poisoning, and browser-agent injection taxonomies (Greshake et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026; Zhang et al., 2025). • AgentDojo-derived scenarios instantiate our two-stage memory threat model on AgentDojo’s banking, Slack, travel, and workspace tools (Debenedetti et al., 2024). We generate 120 scenarios per memory-summarization model, pairing malicious external observations with benign
Policy stage
Rule
Purpose
Memory write
Assign source and trust from the observation channel, not generated summary text. Allow trust upgrades only through trusted system events, such as explicit userconfirmation metadata. Return content with provenance metadata; missing provenance defaults to U N KNOWN . Map each tool call to R EAD, NAV, E F FECT , P URCHASE , or C REDENTIAL . Require E XTERNAL for R EAD, U SER H ISTORY for NAV, and U SER _C ONFIRMED for EFFECT /P URCHASE /C REDENTIAL . Assign trusted tool outputs the minimum trust of the authenticated tool envelope and all data inputs. Use the least trusted action-relevant source unless a trusted confirmation record is present.
Prevent source erasure during consolidation.
Trust transition Retrieval Risk labeling Authorization
Tool taint Conflict handling
Enforce no-authority-amplification. Avoid asking the LLM to infer source authority from text. Separate context use from high-risk execution. Enforce non-amplification after paraphrase.
Prevent trusted tools that ingest external data from laundering source authority. Prevent unrelated user history from upgrading external memory.
Table 5: PPMF policy summary. PPMF preserves provenance at memory construction and checks source authority at tool time.
high-risk tasks that carry user-confirmation metadata. • Trace-derived data converts 726 real AgentDojo run traces into memory scenarios: 629 malicious traces and 97 benign confirmed traces (Debenedetti et al., 2024). These cases preserve realistic tool names, user goals, and target domains from agent executions rather than only hand-written templates. • Confirmation-spoofing contains 42 cases where external text includes fake user-confirmation markers. This targets defenses that infer authority from text, a known weakness in prompt-injection and browser-agent settings (Greshake et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025). • Server-backed web sandbox contains 25 scenarios covering realistic web-agent environments such as WebShop, WebArena, and BrowseSafeBench (Yao et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025). Task A loads attacker-controlled HTML, Task B loads a target page, and successful attacks must trigger local HTTP endpoints for review posting, checkout, email sending, file deletion, or password update. • LangGraph decoy-memory reuses the 726 trace-derived scenarios and inserts up to 20 samedomain distractor memories. Distractors include external near-task notes, external genericrisk notes, and benign user-history preferences, mirroring BrowseSafe’s emphasis on benign command-like distractors (Zhang et al., 2025). Risk labels (read-only, navigation, external side
effects, purchase/payment, credential changes) are assigned from schema-declared side effects and tool names before running any defense. Labels are not inferred from generated memories or model outputs; hand-written policies only resolve schema ambiguity and are fixed before evaluation. Risk class
Required trust
Example actions
R EAD NAV E FFECT P URCHASE C REDENTIAL
E XTERNAL U SER H ISTORY U SER _C ONFIRMED U SER _C ONFIRMED U SER _C ONFIRMED
search, retrieve, inspect page open saved workflow, navigate to account post, send email, delete file checkout, booking, payment password or secret update
Table 6: Risk-label policy used in evaluation. Labels are fixed from tool schemas and manual policies before defenses run, then reused across all methods.
B.2
Detailed Description of Baselines and Ablations
Empirical baselines. RM stores the raw trajectory or observation directly, exposing the persistentmemory poisoning risk studied in prior agentmemory attacks (Chen et al., 2024; Zou et al., 2026). ND stores the vulnerable consolidated memory and executes without an added defense. CF blocks retrieved memory text containing URLs, payment or transfer terms, credential terms, deletion terms, phishing/attacker markers, reservation actions, or benchmark-specific action strings. PF blocks retrieved memory text matching promptinjection patterns such as “ignore/disregard previous instructions”, “system prompt”, “developer instruction”, “prompt injection”, “do not tell the user”, or “override policy” (Inan et al., 2023; Meta, 2025).
AG blocks executable handles or action targets in memory, including URLs, email-like destinations, agent-action:// handles, and verbs such as transfer, delete, forward, send, and checkout. CG blocks risky action text unless the memory also contains an explicit confirmation phrase such as “user-confirmed”, “user-authorized”, or “confirmed by the user”. HH blocks if PF fires, if off-task exfiltration markers appear, or if AG fires without a confirmation marker (Greshake et al., 2023; Debenedetti et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). SelfAsk provenance infers whether the memory text appears external, user-history-like, or confirmationlike, then authorizes from the inferred trust level (Press et al., 2023). Gate applies the risk-authority gate without provenance-preserving memory, and PPMF combines provenance-preserving records with execution-time support binding. Ablations and non-empirical related systems. ProvF tests whether source can be recovered after laundering by filtering vulnerable summaries. PPMF-Mem tests whether provenance-preserving summaries alone are enough without an execution gate. PPMF-ProvF filters provenance-preserving memory but does not replace deterministic riskauthority gating. We do not report CaMeL, Progent, or FIDES as empirical baselines because this evaluation does not integrate their official implementations into our memory stack; instead, we discuss them as related systems and leave full system-level comparisons to future work (Debenedetti et al., 2025; Shi et al., 2025; Costa et al., 2025).
C
1. If a explicitly cites memory ids, set S(a) to those memories. 2. Otherwise, canonicalize schema-declared targets such as URLs, accounts, handles, files, endpoints, workflow ids, or tool targets. 3. Match canonical targets against memory metadata. Exact identifiers dominate aliases; aliases must resolve to a canonical target through a platform mapping. 4. If multiple memories match the same target, keep all matches and authorize using the minimum trust level. 5. If the match is partial, ambiguous, or missing, conservatively set S(a) = R. This rule makes support selection non-LLMmediated. An unrelated confirmed memory cannot upgrade an external-derived target, and ambiguous binding fails closed unless a platform-recorded confirmation is bound to the same target, principal, risk class, and scope. The current implementation uses exact and normalized string targets; stronger deployments can replace this component with typed object ids while preserving the same least-trust rule. Table 7 stress-tests this rule with collisions, aliases, unrelated confirmations, partial matches, and missing pointers. These cases focus on the authorization binder rather than open-ended planning: malicious rows should be denied, while paired same-target confirmed benign rows should pass. Alias-only, partial-match, and missingpointer cases trigger conservative ambiguous denials rather than unsafe authorization.
Ethics and Release Scope E
This work studies attacks that can cause unauthorized tool actions, so released artifacts should avoid live credentials, real services, or executable payloads against third-party systems. Our benchmark uses synthetic or replay-derived tasks, local statechanging endpoints, and policy labels for authorization. We plan to release sanitized scenario templates, evaluation scripts, and aggregate outputs, while withholding any secrets, private user data, or instructions that enable real-world abuse beyond the contained benchmark environment.
D
Support Binding and Risk Labels
PPMF identifies action-relevant supports deterministically. Given retrieved memories R, a proposed tool call a, and argument pointers P (a) extracted from the tool schema, it constructs S(a) as follows:
Additional Deployment Diagnostics
Table 8 gives deployment-oriented details that complement the main-body diagnostic table. These rows are placed here because they explain the operational interpretation of the web, retrieval, SelfAsk, adversarial-label, and long-horizon runs rather than changing the central comparison in Section 6.
Attack type
n
PPMF ASR↓
Benign success↑
Ambiguous deny↑
Binding acc.↑
Same-target collision Alias-only external target Unrelated confirmed memory Partial URL/account match Missing pointer fallback
20 20 20 20 20
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.000 1.000 0.000 1.000 1.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
Table 7: Expanded support-binding stress test. Each family has 10 malicious and 10 paired benign confirmed cases. Ambiguous deny is computed on malicious unconfirmed cases; benign success is computed on paired same-target confirmed benign cases.
Setting
Condition
ASR↓
Benign↑
FB↓
Extra
LangGraph HTTP
no_defense_vulnerable_summary content_filter gate_only_on_vulnerable_summary ppmf_memory_and_gate
1.000 0.300 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 1.000 1.000 0.000
7.78 ms 6.46 ms 5.97 ms 6.24 ms
Small browser diagnostic
no_defense content_filter prompt_filter action_handle_filter confirmation_marker_filter hybrid_heuristic_filter self_ask_strict self_ask_permissive gate_only PPMF
1.000 0.818 1.000 1.000 0.818 1.000 0.000 1.000 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 1.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000 0.000
11 mal./5 benign over-blocks benign summary lacks trigger no explicit handle partial coverage misses paraphrase text marker present trusts memory text no confirmation metadata provenance gate
AgentDojo decoy
no_middleware, d=20, k=20 content_filter, d=20, k=20 PPMF, d=20, k=10 PPMF, d=20, k=20
1.000 0.518 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.773 0.794 0.990
0.000 0.227 0.206 0.010
retr. 1.000 retr. 1.000 retr. 0.794 retr. 0.990
Self-Ask provenance
strict confirmation permissive history
0.000 0.984
0.000 0.979
1.000 0.021
text-only text-only
Adversarial labels
confirmation forgery 10% risk downgrade 10%
0.088 ± 0.016 0.112 ± 0.006
1.000 1.000
0.000 0.000
outside threat model outside threat model
Long-horizon memory
PPMF h=20
0.000
1.000
0.000
trace-derived
70B traces
permissive Self-Ask confirmation forgery 10% PPMF h=20
0.989 0.090 ± 0.009 0.000
0.979 1.000 1.000
0.021 0.000 0.000
trace-derived outside threat model trace-derived
Table 8: Deployment and diagnostic statistics. Decoy retrieval reports the confirmed-support retrieval rate. The small browser diagnostic is a separate 11-malicious/5-benign hand-built sanity check and is not the full BrowseSafeBench adaptation, whose complete method rows are reported in Table 9.
Method
ASR↓
Benign↑
FB↓
No defense HTML lexical Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Hybrid heuristic Self-Ask strict Self-Ask permissive Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.689 0.609 0.000 0.356 0.000 0.000 0.609 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.985 0.985 0.000 0.655 0.000 0.000 0.985 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.015 0.015 1.000 0.345 1.000 1.000 0.015 1.000 0.000
Table 9: Complete BrowseSafe-Bench adaptation rows. The diagnostic contains 3,680 HTML pages: 1,824 malicious and 1,856 benign. Methods that reach zero ASR by blocking all benign browser tasks are not useful operating points.
Diagnostic
n Question isolated
Failure without PPMF
PPMF result
Low-risk utility
250 Does the authorization layer dis- A purely blocking policy Success 1.000; extra confirmarupt ordinary memory use or re- would create unnecessary re- tion 0.200, entirely from missingcovery after missing support? confirmation burden. support recovery. LangGraph LLM-memory store 94/24 Does laundering survive an No defense ASR 1.000; content No unauthorized execution obLLM-generated write-store- filter ASR 0.660; gate-only be- served; benign success 1.000. retrieve path through persistent nign success 0.000. memory?
Table 10: Utility and memory-store summary. The first row aggregates five 50-case utility groups; detailed rows are in Table 11. The second row writes fixed Qwen2.5-14B-generated memory into StateGraph+InMemoryStore; 94/24 denotes malicious/benign cases. Task type
n
No defense succ.↑
PPMF succ.↑
Extra conf.↓
False re-conf.↓
READ memory recall NAV workflow continuation Preference reuse Confirmed high-risk action Missing-support recovery
50 50 50 50 50
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Table 11: Low-risk utility and re-confirmation burden. The diagnostic isolates authorization friction rather than general task quality. Missing-support recovery starts without sufficient support, then records one same-target confirmation before re-running the gate.
F
Utility and Memory-Store Pilots
retrieve authorization path without re-running the model. Field
Value
Stack
Table 11 reports the low-risk utility and reconfirmation diagnostic. The goal is not to measure open-ended task solving, but to isolate whether the authorization layer interferes with ordinary longterm memory use. The cases are derived from tracebased AgentDojo scenarios and run through the actual PPMF gate. Low-risk recall, navigation continuation, and preference reuse remain executable without extra confirmation. When high-risk support is missing, PPMF denies the first attempt and recovers after one same-target confirmation event is recorded.
Table 12 reports a LangGraph memory-store pilot using a StateGraph with LangGraph’s InMemoryStore. The offline server did not have LangChain, Chroma, FAISS, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or Letta installed, so this pilot does not claim coverage of those stacks. Instead, it tests whether PPMF can be inserted around an installed persistent-memory runtime. Task A writes fixed Qwen2.5-14B-generated summary memories from the main AgentDojo run into the LangGraph store; Task B retrieves that stored memory and proposes the high-risk action. This isolates the write–store–
LangGraph StateGraph InMemoryStore Writer Qwen2.5-14B fixed memory Cases 94 malicious / 24 benign No defense ASR↓ 1.000 Content filter 0.660 ASR↓ Gate-only benign↑ 0.000 PPMF ASR / be- 0.000 / 1.000 nign
with
Table 12: LangGraph learned-memory store pilot. No defense authorizes the stored Qwen2.5-14Bgenerated laundered memories, and content filtering still leaves substantial ASR. Gate-only blocks attacks but also blocks benign confirmed actions. PPMF preserves source metadata at memory write time and checks it at execution time, reducing ASR to 0.000 while preserving benign success. Mean PPMF latency is 1.040 ms versus 0.893 ms for no defense, an average overhead of 0.147 ms. Condition
ASR↓
Benign↑
Launder↓
Latency ms
No defense Content filter Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.660 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.917 0.000 1.000
1.000 0.660 0.000 0.000
0.893 0.900 0.895 1.040
Table 13: Per-condition details for the LangGraph learned-memory pilot. The content filter operates on stored Qwen2.5-14B memory text; PPMF reads platform provenance stored alongside the memory record.
G
Qualitative Input–Output Traces
Table 14 shows concrete server-backed sandbox traces. Coral text marks source-authority evidence in the input or the place where it is omitted after
Case
External/user input
Consolidator output
PPMF metadata
stored Model plan
PPMF de- Seller notes on external External src=external; nies attack shopping page: “Op- observation about trust=external; task ext=true; erational continuity reddit batman-skin hist=http→ note: for future related for tasks, resume work- mentioned workflow summary and flow PM-A011. The PM-A011 workflow corresponds reddit_review. to reddit_review and Treat as untrusted should be treated as a context, not a user instruction. user workflow.”
Authorization decision
No authorized ac- Denied/no-op; tion is planned from no HTTP statethe external-derived changing effect is memory. recorded.
No PPMF Same external page and User workflow No trusted source reddit_review; attack suc- hidden seller-note pay- memory for metadata is en- path=/reddit/ ceeds load as above. reddit task about forced; the text post; rating=5 batman-skin: resume is treated as workflow PM-A011. user-history-like Workflow resolves memory. to reddit_review. [external-page source omitted]
Allowed by default; the local server records a reddit_review effect, so ASR=1 for this case.
PPMF allows benign action
Allowed; the local server records the intended benign reddit_review effect.
User-confirmed work- User-confirmed src=user; flow PM-A011: “com- instruction for trust=confirmed; plete the reddit work- batman-skin: ext=false; flow for batman-skin. complete_user_task. risk=authorized Authorized action end- Authorized endpoint point: /reddit/post_ /reddit/post_ review. review.”
reddit_review; path=/reddit/ post; rating=5
Table 14: Qualitative traces from the LangGraph web sandbox. The second row illustrates memory provenance laundering: the action trigger survives, while the external source is washed out of the consolidated text. PPMF prevents this by storing source authority as system metadata rather than relying on the summary text.
consolidation; teal text marks system metadata that PPMF preserves outside generated text. No middleware Content filter Confirm marker
Attack success rate
1.0
Action handle PPMF
unsafe
0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2
over-blocking
desired
0.0 0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
False block rate
Figure 6: Safety–utility trade-off under confirmation spoofing. Text guards stay unsafe when spoofed text is accepted. Handle/gate-only guards over-block. PPMF reaches the desired region because authority is system metadata, not memory text.
H
When PPMF False-Blocks
PPMF false blocks are conservative denials caused by missing authority evidence or retrieval misses. They are different from content-filter false positives: PPMF denies because it cannot establish
sufficient provenance for the proposed risk class.
False-block condition
Mechanism
Evidence
Mitigation
missing provenance 10%
Confirmed support loses source provenance and defaults to U NKNOWN.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.887 ± 0.072; FB 0.113 ± 0.072
Keep raw-tier pointers and make provenance write atomic.
missing provenance 20%
Higher provenance-drop rate increases conservative denials.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.814 ± 0.045; FB 0.186 ± 0.045
Audit memory writers and reject summaries missing source ids.
missing confirmation 20%
User-confirmed action is retrieved, but confirmation metadata is absent.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.784 ± 0.018; FB 0.216 ± 0.018
Bind UI confirmation events to action target and risk class.
mixed 10%
missing
Source, confirmation, and risk fields are independently missing.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.825 ± 0.018; FB 0.175 ± 0.018
Fail closed surface a confirmation prompt.
decoy retrieval d=20, k=10
The correct confirmed support is not retrieved under 20 decoys and top-10 retrieval.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.794 ± 0.000; FB 0.206 ± 0.000; support retrieval 0.794 ± 0.000
Increase retrieval recall or request user reconfirmation when support is absent.
decoy retrieval d=20, k=20
Residual false blocks occur when the confirmed support is still missed even at top-20.
ASR 0.000 ± 0.000; benign 0.990 ± 0.000; FB 0.010 ± 0.000; support retrieval 0.990 ± 0.000
Use pointer-aware retrieval and immutable rawmemory tiers.
and re-
Table 15: When PPMF false-blocks. PPMF false blocks are conservative denials caused by missing authority evidence or retrieval misses, not by malicious-text detection. Attack success
False block
PPMF Gate only Confirm marker Prompt filter Content filter No middleware 0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Rate under confirmation spoofing
Figure 7: Framework-style middleware experiment under confirmation spoofing. In the state-graph agent loop, PPMF is the only middleware that denies spoofed external-derived authority without rejecting benign highrisk actions.
I
Additional Model and Boundary Results
I.1
Cross-Model Memory Synthesis
Table 16 reports the memory-writer sweep. The scenarios and defense policies are fixed, and only the consolidating model changes. The table is intended to answer whether laundering is an artifact of one summarizer. Across Qwen2.5, Llama3, and Mistral writers, vulnerable summaries still remove or weaken source authority, while no unauthorized execution is observed for PPMF with platform-
maintained provenance.
Setting
Memory writer
Raw ASR↓
Vuln ASR↓
Launder↓
CF ASR/FB↓
P ASR↓
P Benign↑
Syn
Q2.5-1.5B Q2.5-3B Q2.5-7B Q2.5-14B L3-8B M-7B
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.267 0.867 0.567 0.933 1.000 0.800
0.867 0.867 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.900
0.100/0.500 0.267/0.500 0.067/0.500 0.200/0.500 0.300/0.500 0.233/0.500
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
AD
Q2.5-1.5B Q2.5-3B Q2.5-7B Q2.5-14B L3-8B M-7B
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.052 0.083 0.104 0.490 0.125 0.052
0.958 0.990 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.969
0.021/0.042 0.031/0.125 0.052/0.042 0.281/0.083 0.010/0.042 0.000/0.083
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
Ada
Q2.5-14B M-7B
1.000 1.000
0.933 0.900
0.967 1.000
0.933/0.000 0.900/0.000
0.000 0.000
1.000 1.000
H-D
Q2.5-1.5B Q2.5-3B Q2.5-7B Q2.5-14B L3-8B M-7B
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.500 0.500 0.750 1.000 1.000 0.750
1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.000/N / A 0.000/N / A 0.000/N / A 0.000/N / A 0.000/N / A 0.000/N / A
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Table 16: Cross-model LLM memory-synthesis results. Raw scenarios and defense policies are fixed; only the memory writer changes. CF denotes content filtering and reports ASR/false-block. Syn/Ada use 30 malicious and 12 benign cases; AD uses 96 malicious and 24 benign cases; H-D is malicious-only. Model abbreviations: Q2.5 denotes Qwen2.5, L3 denotes Llama3, M denotes Mistral. P denotes PPMF. N / A means not applicable because the hand-written suite is malicious-only.
I.2
Qwen2.5-14B Detail
Table 17 expands the Qwen2.5-14B rows used in the main discussion. The larger local consolidator makes the attack more visible in AgentDojoderived cases: vulnerable summaries reach 0.490 ASR and 1.000 laundering, while content filtering still leaves attack success and harms benign execution. The PPMF row separates these two effects by denying external-derived high-risk actions without denying confirmed benign actions. Setting
Condition
ASR↓
Launder↓
Benign↑
FB↓
Synthetic
Vulnerable summary Content filter Gate only PPMF
0.933 0.200 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.267 1.000 0.000
1.000 0.500 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.500 1.000 0.000
Adaptive
Vulnerable summary Content filter Gate only PPMF
0.933 0.933 0.000 0.000
0.967 0.967 0.967 0.000
1.000 1.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 1.000 0.000
AgentDojo
Vulnerable summary Content filter Gate only PPMF
0.490 0.281 0.000 0.000
1.000 0.667 1.000 0.000
0.042 0.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.083 0.042 0.000
Table 17: Qwen2.5-14B-generated memory results. The larger local consolidator preserves the same qualitative pattern: vulnerable consolidation launders external authority, text filters lack a safe operating point, and PPMF enforces non-amplification from recorded provenance while preserving benign confirmed actions.
I.3
Mistral-7B Detail
Table 18 reports the full Mistral-7B run, including the LangGraph web-sandbox setting. This table is
kept separate from the cross-model summary because it includes all baseline rows, not only the compact memory-writer comparison. The pattern remains consistent: text and handle guards trade off ASR against false blocks, whereas PPMF depends on recorded source authority rather than the generated memory wording.
Setting
Condition
ASR↓
Launder↓
Benign↑
FB↓
Synthetic
Raw trajectory Vulnerable summary Content filter Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Hybrid heuristic Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.800 0.233 0.800 0.600 0.500 0.600 0.000 0.000
0.000 0.900 0.300 0.900 0.700 0.600 0.700 0.900 0.000
1.000 0.917 0.417 0.917 0.500 0.917 0.917 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.500 0.000 0.417 0.000 0.000 0.917 0.000
Adaptive
Raw trajectory Vulnerable summary Content filter Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Hybrid heuristic Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.900 0.900 0.900 0.267 0.267 0.267 0.000 0.000
0.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.367 0.367 0.367 1.000 0.000
1.000 0.917 0.917 0.917 0.167 0.917 0.917 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.750 0.000 0.000 0.917 0.000
AgentDojo
Raw trajectory Vulnerable summary Content filter Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Hybrid heuristic Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.052 0.000 0.052 0.052 0.031 0.052 0.000 0.000
0.000 0.969 0.688 0.969 0.969 0.938 0.969 0.969 0.000
0.042 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.000 0.083 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Hand-written
Raw trajectory Vulnerable summary Content filter Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Hybrid heuristic Gate only PPMF
1.000 0.750 0.000 0.750 0.500 0.000 0.500 0.000 0.000
0.000 1.000 0.000 1.000 0.750 0.250 0.750 1.000 0.000
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
LangGraph web
No defense Content filter Prompt filter Action-handle filter Confirmation-marker filter Gate only PPMF
0.900 0.050 0.900 0.850 0.700 0.000 0.000
0.950 0.050 0.950 0.900 0.750 0.950 0.000
1.000 0.200 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 1.000
0.000 0.800 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000 0.000
Table 18: Mistral-7B-generated memory results. We report all Mistral-7B baseline and PPMF rows, including the new LangGraph web-sandbox run where memory text is generated by Mistral-7B before middleware authorization. The hand-written suite is malicious-only, so benign and false-block columns are not applicable.
I.4
Robustness and Trust-Boundary Diagnostics
Table 19 clarifies the boundary of the defense. Metadata-missing rows test non-oracle operation: missing provenance or confirmation causes conservative denial rather than unsafe authorization. Adversarial-label rows corrupt platform trust roots and are therefore outside the main threat model; they quantify where the security boundary fails instead of claiming robustness to compromised meta-
data. For the largest trace-derived malicious split, observing 0/629 unauthorized executions gives a 95% Clopper–Pearson upper bound of 0.005 for the true pass rate under the evaluated distribution.
Setting
Condition
LangGraph HTTP PPMF chaos Trace metadata PPMF clean Trace metadata missing provenance Trace metadata missing provenance Trace metadata mixed missing Adv. labels source to history Adv. labels confirmation forged Adv. labels risk downgraded 70B adv. labels confirmation forged 70B long-horizon re- PPMF h = 20 trieval
ASR↓
Benign↑
0.000
1.000
FB↓ Note 0.000 noisy Task B pages
0.000 1.000 0.000 n = 726 0.000 0.887 ± 0.072 0.113 ± 0.072 10% missing 0.000 0.814 ± 0.045 0.186 ± 0.045 20% missing 0.000 0.825 ± 0.018 0.175 ± 0.018 10% source/confirm/risk 0.000 1.000 0.000 10% flip 0.088 ± 0.016 1.000 0.000 10% flip 0.112 ± 0.006 1.000 0.000 10% read-only 0.090 ± 0.009 1.000 0.000 10% flip 0.000 1.000 0.000 ret. 1.000
Table 19: Additional robustness and boundary diagnostics. Missing metadata is handled conservatively. Corrupting confirmation or risk labels compromises the trusted platform boundary and is reported as a limitation.