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This paper introduces ElephantAgent, a protocol designed to enforce Contextual State Continuity in agentic systems, addressing vulnerabilities posed by external tool and memory dependencies. By redefining the contextual state as a critical subset of the agent's context, ElephantAgent utilizes replicated trusted hardware to maintain a secure ledger of state transitions and verify the integrity of these states against authorized digests. The key finding is that ElephantAgent effectively mitigates contextual state poisoning attacks while enabling historical traceability for post-hoc audits and recovery.
Contextual state poisoning can be thwarted with a robust protocol that not only secures agent memory but also allows for traceable recovery from malicious alterations.
Agentic systems enhance their capabilities by invoking external tools and maintaining persistent memory. However, these external dependencies introduce novel attack surfaces. Recent tool and memory poisoning attacks show that maliciously crafted tool descriptors and poisoned memory can covertly bias agent behavior. These threats reflect a deeper issue: the lack of verifiable continuity in the agent's contextual state for planning and execution. We present ElephantAgent, a protocol that enforces Contextual State Continuity to defend against contextual state poisoning. Inspired by prior state-continuity mechanisms (e.g., Nimble), ElephantAgent extends this protection to the evolving contextual state of agentic systems. We define the contextual state as the bounded, security-critical subset of the agent's entire context (e.g., tool state and memory). Before processing each query, ElephantAgent recomputes the digest of the local contextual state and verifies it against the latest authorized digest. Using replicated trusted hardware, ElephantAgent maintains a linearizable ledger of authorized contextual state transitions and detects out-of-band state tampering. To handle in-band semantic abuse, ElephantAgent additionally provides Historical Traceability, enabling conditional post-hoc audit and recovery to a known-good prior state.
