A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

arXiv:2604.16548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance (VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

Abstract:The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance (VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

15 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables. Accepted to EMNLP 2026

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

K.6.5; I.2.0; D.4.6

arXiv:2604.16548 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2604.16548v3 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16548 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

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