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Real AI Agents with Fake Memories: Fatal Context Manipulation Attacks on Web3 Agents

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arxiv 2503.16248 v3 pith:BN226CIX submitted 2025-03-20 cs.CR cs.AI

Real AI Agents with Fake Memories: Fatal Context Manipulation Attacks on Web3 Agents

classification cs.CR cs.AI
keywords agentscontextinjectionattackmanipulationmemoryweb3blockchain
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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AI agents integrated with Web3 offer autonomy and openness but raise security concerns as they interact with financial protocols and immutable smart contracts. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of AI agents within blockchain-based financial ecosystems when exposed to adversarial threats in real-world scenarios. We introduce the concept of context manipulation -- a comprehensive attack vector that exploits unprotected context surfaces, including input channels, memory modules, and external data feeds. It expands on traditional prompt injection and reveals a more stealthy and persistent threat: memory injection. Using ElizaOS, a representative decentralized AI agent framework for automated Web3 operations, we showcase that malicious injections into prompts or historical records can trigger unauthorized asset transfers and protocol violations which could be financially devastating in reality. To quantify these risks, we introduce CrAIBench, a Web3-focused benchmark covering 150+ realistic blockchain tasks. such as token transfers, trading, bridges, and cross-chain interactions, and 500+ attack test cases using context manipulation. Our evaluation results confirm that AI models are significantly more vulnerable to memory injection compared to prompt injection. Finally, we evaluate a comprehensive defense roadmap, finding that prompt-injection defenses and detectors only provide limited protection when stored context is corrupted, whereas fine-tuning-based defenses substantially reduce attack success rates while preserving performance on single-step tasks. These results underscore the urgent need for AI agents that are both secure and fiduciarily responsible in blockchain environments.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Trojan Hippo: Weaponizing Agent Memory for Data Exfiltration

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Trojan Hippo attacks on LLM agent memory achieve 85-100% success rates in data exfiltration across four memory backends even after 100 benign sessions, while evaluated defenses reduce success rates but impose varying ...

  2. The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    No major agentic AI framework complies with six safety containment principles; a memory poisoning attack on LangChain causes persistent targeted errors up to 88.9% wrongful denials and 3.5x increase under complex poli...

  3. Trojan Hippo: Weaponizing Agent Memory for Data Exfiltration

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    The paper defines and evaluates Trojan Hippo attacks on LLM agent memory, showing 85-100% success in data exfiltration across backends and reduced rates with defenses at varying utility costs.

  4. Epistemic Bias Injection: Manipulating LLM Opinion via Selective Context Retrieval

    cs.CR 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0

    Factually correct but one-sided passages injected into a RAG database can shift LLM answers toward an attacker's stance, and a PCA/KL-based filter (BiasDef) reduces that shift.

  5. ElephantAgent: Contextual State Continuity in Agentic Systems

    cs.AI 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    ElephantAgent maintains a linearizable ledger of contextual state transitions via replicated trusted hardware and adds historical traceability for post-hoc recovery from semantic abuse in agentic systems.

  6. SoK: Security of Autonomous LLM Agents in Agentic Commerce

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper systematizes security for LLM agents in agentic commerce into five threat dimensions, identifies 12 cross-layer attack vectors, and proposes a layered defense architecture.

  7. Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A synthesis of 247 papers on LLM agent security identifies prompt injection and tool hijacking as dominant threats, notes weakly compositional defenses, and argues for trust boundaries and realistic evaluations.