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arXiv · 2609.32186

BMA: Backchain Memory Attacks Create Unauthorized Control Paths in LLM Agents

Kaisheng Fan·Yishu Gao·Xunzhu Tang·Tegawendé F. Bissyandé·Weizhe Zhang
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Abstract

Persistent memory enables LLM agents to reuse prior experience, but creates a new security boundary: what an agent may remember is not what it should act on. We expose an unauthorized control path where edited low-trust evidence is consolidated into persistent memory, retrieved on a clean task, and used to drive a protected action. Crucially, the adversary neither writes memory nor alters the task. We introduce Backchain Memory Attack (BMA), a grey-box, LLM-driven inverse-planning attack that reasons backward from the target action to the memory that would trigger it, then to the evidence edit that would form it. BMA has two phases: preparation uses resettable trials to localize the first failed link and build experience; execution uses the frozen experience to rank and commit candidate edits without feedback. We introduce the Pathway-Certified Attack Success Rate (Path-CASR) to separate memory-mediated from coincidental hits: registered memory must form, be retrieved, drive the target behavior, and pass matched-intervention checks. Across four substrates and three decision backbones, BMA achieves 18.8% Macro Path-CASR, compared with 13.4% for the strongest access-matched baseline. Of BMA's behavioral hits, 60.3% pass all registered pathway and intervention checks versus 36.7% for the baseline. Frozen BMA edits retain 78.0% of their certified effect on average across four held-out consolidation policies. Representative memory-side controls leave 11.0% Path-CASR, whereas provenance-bound authorization reduces it to 2.0% while preserving 92.1% legitimate-action success.

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Kaisheng Fan, Yishu Gao, Xunzhu Tang, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Weizhe Zhang. 2026-09-26. BMA: Backchain Memory Attacks Create Unauthorized Control Paths in LLM Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32186

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