No Attacker Needed: Unintentional Cross-User Contamination in Shared-State LLM Agents
LLM-based agents increasingly operate across repeated sessions, maintaining task states to ensure continuity. In many deployments, a single agent serves multiple users within a team or organization, reusing a shared knowledge layer across user identities. This shared persistence expands the failure surface: information that is locally valid for one user can silently degrade another user's outcome when the agent reapplies it without regard for scope. We refer to this failure mode as unintentional cross-user contamination (UCC). Unlike adversarial memory poisoning, UCC requires no attacker; it arises from benign interactions whose scope-bound artifacts persist and are later misapplied. We f...
| Authors | Tiankai Yang, Jiate Li, Yi Nian et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 April 2026 |
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