Agent Memory Guard: Prevent memory poisoning in DSPy agents with persistent state (OWASP)

[vgudur-dev]

What I built

Agent Memory Guard — an open-source Python middleware that screens memory reads/writes in AI agent systems for injection attacks, data poisoning, and exfiltration.

Why DSPy users should care

If you use DSPy's memory modules, conversation history, or any pipeline with persistent state across calls, your programs are vulnerable to memory poisoning — classified as OWASP ASI-06.

Attack scenario:

1. Attacker crafts input with an encoded injection payload
2. Your DSPy program stores it in conversation history or retrieval cache
3. On next retrieval, the poisoned memory enters the LLM's context
4. Program follows attacker's instructions instead of optimized behavior

Integration with DSPy

pip install agent-memory-guard

import dspy
from agent_memory_guard import MemoryGuard

guard = MemoryGuard()

class SecureRAG(dspy.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        self.retrieve = dspy.Retrieve(k=5)
        self.generate = dspy.ChainOfThought("context, question -> answer")
    
    def forward(self, question):
        # Screen the question before processing
        scan = guard.scan(question)
        if not scan.is_safe:
            return dspy.Prediction(answer=f"Blocked: {scan.threat_type}")
        
        # Retrieve and screen results
        passages = self.retrieve(question).passages
        safe_passages = [p for p in passages if guard.scan(p).is_safe]
        
        return self.generate(context=safe_passages, question=question)

Key features

• 5 detection layers: heuristic patterns, embedding similarity, entropy analysis, encoding detection, LLM-as-judge
• 59μs median latency — adds no noticeable overhead to DSPy's compilation
• Framework agnostic — works with DSPy, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen
• OWASP incubator project — actively maintained

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/OWASP/www-project-agent-memory-guard
• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/agent-memory-guard/
• OWASP page: https://owasp.org/www-project-agent-memory-guard/

Would love feedback from the DSPy community — especially on the best integration points (custom module? assertion?).