SlotGuard: Stop Oversharing Private Local Context in LLM Agent Transcri

Abstract:LLM agents can leak privacy (e.g., paths, emails) and credentials (e.g., API keys) as agent observations (e.g., tool outputs, shell logs, and file reads) are appended to provider-bound transcripts. Existing placeholder redaction is brittle: it can miss embedded or cross-turn references, over-redact benign lookalikes, and destroy the structure useful for reasoning. We present SlotGuard, a local transcript boundary that can hide sensitive data while retaining agents' performance. SlotGuard rewrites structural bindings as typed, suffix-aware slots, replaces secrets with format-preserving synthetic values, links cross-turn references with a lightweight session graph, and restores raw values only inside the trusted runtime. On controlled repository-oriented agent transcripts, SlotGuard removes all 20,814 annotated structurally sensitive characters across 9,229 paths and reduces credential leakage to 0.0\% across 852 planted values. It remains close to raw-transcript task success across four upstream models, while generic redaction drops to 2.5\%. Transcript rewriting takes a median of 14.424~$\mu$s per agent turn. The code is publicly accessible at this https URL.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.17147 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2607.17147v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17147 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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