❌

Reading view

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.
  •  

Pyruvate is a natural suppressor of interferon signaling by inducing STAT1 protein pyruvylation

Yibo et al. identify protein pyruvylation as a post-translational modification that can modulate immune signaling and host antiviral response.
  •  

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.
  •  

Depth Charge: Jailbreak Large Language Models from Deep Safety Attention Heads

arXiv:2603.05772v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Currently, open-sourced large language models (OSLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative performance. However, as their structure and weights are made public, they are exposed to jailbreak attacks even after alignment. Existing attacks operate primarily at shallow levels, such as the prompt or embedding level, and often fail to expose vulnerabilities rooted in deeper model components, which creates a false sense of security for successful defense. In this paper, we propose \textbf{\underline{S}}afety \textbf{\underline{A}}ttention \textbf{\underline{H}}ead \textbf{\underline{A}}ttack (\textbf{SAHA}), an attention-head-level jailbreak framework that explores the vulnerability in deeper but insufficiently aligned attention heads. SAHA contains two novel designs. Firstly, we reveal that deeper attention layers introduce more vulnerability against jailbreak attacks. Based on this finding, \textbf{SAHA} introduces \textit{Ablation-Impact Ranking} head selection strategy to effectively locate the most vital layer for unsafe output. Secondly, we introduce a boundary-aware perturbation method, \textit{i.e. Layer-Wise Perturbation}, to probe the generation of unsafe content with minimal perturbation to the attention. This constrained perturbation guarantees higher semantic relevance with the target intent while ensuring evasion. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method: SAHA improves ASR by 14\% over SOTA baselines, revealing the vulnerability of the attack surface on the attention head. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SAHA.
  •  

Knowing without Acting: The Disentangled Geometry of Safety Mechanisms in Large Language Models

arXiv:2603.05773v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is often conceptualized as a monolithic process wherein harmfulness detection automatically triggers refusal. However, the persistence of jailbreak attacks suggests a fundamental mechanistic decoupling. We propose the \textbf{\underline{D}}isentangled \textbf{\underline{S}}afety \textbf{\underline{H}}ypothesis \textbf{(DSH)}, positing that safety computation operates on two distinct subspaces: a \textit{Recognition Axis} ($\mathbf{v}_H$, ``Knowing'') and an \textit{Execution Axis} ($\mathbf{v}_R$, ``Acting''). Our geometric analysis reveals a universal ``Reflex-to-Dissociation'' evolution, where these signals transition from antagonistic entanglement in early layers to structural independence in deep layers. To validate this, we introduce \textit{Double-Difference Extraction} and \textit{Adaptive Causal Steering}. Using our curated \textsc{AmbiguityBench}, we demonstrate a causal double dissociation, effectively creating a state of ``Knowing without Acting.'' Crucially, we leverage this disentanglement to propose the \textbf{Refusal Erasure Attack (REA)}, which achieves State-of-the-Art attack success rates by surgically lobotomizing the refusal mechanism. Furthermore, we uncover a critical architectural divergence, contrasting the \textit{Explicit Semantic Control} of Llama3.1 with the \textit{Latent Distributed Control} of Qwen2.5. The code and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DSH.
  •  
❌