MemPoison: Uncovering Persistent Memory Threats and Structural Blind Spots in LLM Agents

Persistent external memory enhances agent continuity but introduces persistent security vulnerabilities: adversarial content can be injected via standard interaction channels, retained across turns, and later distort downstream behavior. To address this challenge, we propose **MemPoison**, a comprehensive benchmark and analysis framework featuring 1227 hand-validated cases across four attack types, three injection channels, and three representative memory substrates, evaluated on seven open-weight and three closed-weight model families. We introduce a three-tier taxonomy: (**L1**) direct single-record corruption, (**L2**) compositional multi-record corruption and (**L3**) context-triggered dormant corruption. Our evaluations reveal a distinct defense frontier: while baseline write-time defenses, such as consistency checks, substantially suppress direct L1 attacks, they fail to reliably suppress L2 and L3 attacks. Through **mechanistic influence decomposition (MID)**, we demonstrate structural blind spots in write-time defenses, which admit seemingly benign records that later become harmful through joint retrieval composition or trigger-conditioned activation. Our findings advocate for shifting from static filtering to adaptive, context-sensitive memory defense strategies. Code, benchmark artifacts, and evaluation scripts are publicly released