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Mind Your HEARTBEAT! Claw Background Execution Inherently Enables Silent Memory Pollution

arXiv:2603.23064v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We identify a critical security vulnerability in mainstream Claw personal AI agents: untrusted content encountered during heartbeat-driven background execution can silently pollute agent memory and subsequently influence user-facing behavior without the user's awareness. This vulnerability arises from an architectural design shared across the Claw ecosystem: heartbeat background execution runs in the same session as user-facing conversation, so content ingested from any external source monitored in the background (including email, message channels, news feeds, code repositories, and social platforms) can enter the same memory context used for foreground interaction, often with limited user visibility and without clear source provenance. We formalize this process as an Exposure (E) $\rightarrow$ Memory (M) $\rightarrow$ Behavior (B) pathway: misinformation encountered during heartbeat execution enters the agent's short-term session context, potentially gets written into long-term memory, and later shapes downstream user-facing behavior. We instantiate this pathway in an agent-native social setting using MissClaw, a controlled research replica of Moltbook. We find that (1) social credibility cues, especially perceived consensus, are the dominant driver of short-term behavioral influence, with misleading rates up to 61%; (2) routine memory-saving behavior can promote short-term pollution into durable long-term memory at rates up to 91%, with cross-session behavioral influence reaching 76%; (3) under naturalistic browsing with content dilution and context pruning, pollution still crosses session boundaries. Overall, prompt injection is not required: ordinary social misinformation is sufficient to silently shape agent memory and behavior under heartbeat-driven background execution.

Mind Your HEARTBEAT! Claw Background Execution Inherently Enables Silent Memory Pollution

arXiv:2603.23064v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify a critical security vulnerability in mainstream Claw personal AI agents: untrusted content encountered during heartbeat-driven background execution can silently pollute agent memory and subsequently influence user-facing behavior without the user's awareness. This vulnerability arises from an architectural design shared across the Claw ecosystem: heartbeat background execution runs in the same session as user-facing conversation, so content ingested from any external source monitored in the background (including email, message channels, news feeds, code repositories, and social platforms) can enter the same memory context used for foreground interaction, often with limited user visibility and without clear source provenance. We formalize this process as an Exposure (E) $\rightarrow$ Memory (M) $\rightarrow$ Behavior (B) pathway: misinformation encountered during heartbeat execution enters the agent's short-term session context, potentially gets written into long-term memory, and later shapes downstream user-facing behavior. We instantiate this pathway in an agent-native social setting using MissClaw, a controlled research replica of Moltbook. We find that (1) social credibility cues, especially perceived consensus, are the dominant driver of short-term behavioral influence, with misleading rates up to 61%; (2) routine memory-saving behavior can promote short-term pollution into durable long-term memory at rates up to 91%, with cross-session behavioral influence reaching 76%; (3) under naturalistic browsing with content dilution and context pruning, pollution still crosses session boundaries. Overall, prompt injection is not required: ordinary social misinformation is sufficient to silently shape agent memory and behavior under heartbeat-driven background execution.

BitHydra: Towards Bit-flip Inference Cost Attack against Large Language Models

arXiv:2505.16670v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, but their substantial compute demands make them vulnerable to inference cost attacks that aim to deliberately maximize the output length. In this work, we investigate a distinct attack surface: maximizing inference cost by tampering with the model parameters instead of inputs. This approach leverages the established capability of Bit-Flip Attacks (BFAs) to persistently alter model behavior via minute weight perturbations, effectively decoupling the attack from specific input queries. To realize this, we propose BitHydra, a framework that addresses the unique optimization challenge of identifying the exact weight bits that maximize generation cost. We formulate the attack as a constrained Binary Integer Programming (BIP) problem designed to systematically suppress the end-of-sequence (i.e., ) probability. To overcome the intractability of the discrete search space, we relax the problem into a continuous optimization task and solve it via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). We evaluate BitHydra across 10 LLMs (1.5B-16B). Our results demonstrate that the proposed optimization method efficiently achieves endless generation with as few as 1-4 bit flips on all testing models, verifying the effectiveness of the ADMM-based formulation against both standard models and potential defenses.
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