A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle
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,...
| Authors | Zehao Lin, Xixuan Hao, Renyu Fu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 17 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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