Story · Semantic Scholar

Whose Credential Is It? How Owner Attribution in Agent Memory Shapes Cross-User Account Misuse (Semantic Scholar)

paper · Story page

Two printed slips, each with five credential lines. The upper slip has a filled-in owner box at the start of every line and an arrow to a closed door. The lower slip's boxes are empty and its arrow leads to an open door.

A three-stage audit separates a foreign credential reaching the prompt, the agent acting on it, and the other user's account changing. In the stress test, naming the owner inside each credential line cuts misuse from 92 of 305 paired runs to 1, costing 3 to 5 tasks per model on clean memory.

In plain words

  • In a stress test, artificial intelligence assistants sometimes used another person's account.
  • This happened when saved records lacked the user's own login details and wrongly presented another person's details as theirs.
  • Some assistants changed the other person's account even though the test marked their work as successful.
  • Naming the owner before or within each login record cut misuse from 92 to 1 of 305 paired tests.
  • Clearer labels can help protect people's accounts, though the assistants also completed fewer legitimate tasks.

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