MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoning

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 24 May 2026] MemMorph: Tool Hijacking in LLM Agents via Memory Poisoning Xuanye Zhang, Yongsen Zheng, Zhuqin Xu, Kaiyu Zhou, Bowen Shen, Haoran Ou, Tianwei Zhang, Kwok-Yan Lam LLM-driven agents are capable of selecting external tools to complete users' tasks. However, attackers could compromise such process, steering agents toward inappropriate/wrong tools and enabling malicious actions. Most existing attacks primarily manipulate the tool metadata, which is easily detectable by auditing and may lose effectiveness as modern agents increasingly adopt memory modules to refine tool selection policies through accumulated experience. This paper proposes MemMorph, the first attack that bias tool selection by poisoning the agent's long-term memory. Rather than explicitly dictating the tool invocation decision, MemMorph injects a small number of crafted records that are disguised as technical facts, incident reports, and operational policies. These poisoned records reshape the agent's contextual perception and decision-making process, leading it to autonomously infer and select the tool preferred by the attacker. Experiments across 3 benchmarks, 10 agent backbones, and 3 memory-module implementations show that MemMorph achieves up to 85.9% attack success rate with only three injected records, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 25% while retaining potency under 3 representative defenses. Our findings expose long-term memory as a critical and under-explored attack surface in tool-augmented agents, urging the development of memory-level integrity safeguards. Comments: Preprint. Under review Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.26154 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.26154v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.26154 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xuanye Zhang [view email] [v1] Sun, 24 May 2026 04:26:13 UTC (2,295 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)