@inproceedings{lin-etal-2026-survey,
title = "A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in {LLM} Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle",
author = "Lin, Zehao and
Hao, Xixuan and
Fu, Renyu and
Cui, Shaobo and
Chen, Kai and
Li, Chunyu and
li, Zhiyu and
Xiong, Feiyu",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2296/",
pages = "52221--52235",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "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, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance (VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset."
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<abstract>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, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance (VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle
%A Lin, Zehao
%A Hao, Xixuan
%A Fu, Renyu
%A Cui, Shaobo
%A Chen, Kai
%A Li, Chunyu
%A li, Zhiyu
%A Xiong, Feiyu
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F lin-etal-2026-survey
%X 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, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance (VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2296/
%P 52221-52235
Markdown (Informal)
[A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2296/) (Lin et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Zehao Lin, Xixuan Hao, Renyu Fu, Shaobo Cui, Kai Chen, Chunyu Li, Zhiyu li, and Feiyu Xiong. 2026. A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 52221–52235, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.