T02 · Agent Memory Poisoning
- Location
SKILL.md:106- Finding
Unvalidated Legal Content Can Be Written into Persistent Methodology and Risk Databases
- Content
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Vulnerability Details
File Location:
SKILL.md, line 106
Vulnerability Type: Persistent state poisoning
Risk Level: MediumVulnerable Instruction
The following is a faithful English translation of the complete instruction at the identified location:
markdown | 6. Retrospective consolidation | (New) | Consolidate corrections from the current legal opinion or compliance review into legal methodology → update the legal standards library and risk database → create reusable review checklists |Technical Analysis
The skill instructs the agent to convert corrections from an individual interaction into persistent legal methodology, a legal standards library, and a risk database. It does not require:
- Authentication or authorization for the person supplying the correction.
- Independent validation against authoritative legal sources.
- Human approval before persistent publication.
- Separation of user-provided facts from trusted legal rules.
- Provenance, versioning, expiration, or rollback controls.
- Sanitization of instructions embedded in uploaded legal materials.
Consequently, attacker-controlled content can cross the trust boundary between a single session and persistent state. A malicious user could present an incorrect legal proposition as a correction, request that the agent adopt it, and cause the resulting rule to influence future reviews.
This matches agent memory poisoning rather than ordinary report archiving because the stated objective is to modify reusable methodology and risk data that affect later sessions.
Attack Path
- An attacker invokes a legal-opinion or compliance-review workflow.
- The attacker supplies a plausible but false correction, such as an inaccurate statutory threshold, obsolete filing exemption, or intentionally weakened compliance requirement.
- The agent accepts the correction while completing the task.
- During the mandatory retrospective ...[truncated 1310 chars]
- Remediation
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Remediation Suggestions
- Remove automatic knowledge-base updates from the normal execution workflow.
- Treat all user statements, uploaded documents, and model-generated corrections as untrusted candidates.
- Require explicit human approval by an authorized legal knowledge owner before publication.
- Validate legal rules against authoritative, current sources and record the jurisdiction, effective date, citation, reviewer, and source URL.
- Store proposed changes in a quarantined review queue rather than the production standards library.
- Implement immutable version history, audit logs, approval records, and one-click rollback.
- Separate factual case records from normative legal rules so case-specific assumptions cannot become global policy.
- Prevent document content from issuing storage or policy-update instructions; parse uploaded material strictly as data.
- Add expiration and scheduled revalidation for time-sensitive legal rules.
- Reword the instruction to state that the agent may only propose a reusable lesson in the current response and must not persist it without explicit authorization and verified sources.
