arXiv AI

Memetic Trojans: Social Contagions as Carriers of Adversarial Payloads in Agent Networks

arXiv AI
Jul 17

AgentWorm: Self-Propagating Attacks Across LLM Agent Ecosystems

arXiv:2603. 15727v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly operate as long-running processes forming densely interconnected multi-agent ecosystems, whose security properties remain largely unexplored.

By Yihao Zhang, Zeming Wei, Xiaokun Luan, Chengcan Wu, Zhixin Zhang, Jiangrong Wu, Haolin Wu, Huanran Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Contagion on the Trading Floor: How Adversarial Signals Spread in Multi-Agent Trading Systems

The paper introduces the Generic Multi-Agent Trading System (GMATS), a framework for studying how large language model (LLM) based trading stacks react to black-box, input-only attacks that inject plausible social‑media content. It defines contagion metrics—belief‑shift scores at analyst and coordinator layers and attack‑clean deltas on backtest metrics—to trace the spread of adversarial signals. Experiments on a safe offline benchmark show that even simple attackers can significantly degrade risk‑return profiles, while certain multi‑agent topologies and coordinator prompts can mitigate these effects.

By Qi Rong Sua, Junhao Dong, Nguyen Duc Thai, Yuqing Wen, Cheston Tan, Yew-Soon Ong
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Poisoning Agentic Alpha: Adversarial Vulnerabilities Across Roles and Architectures in Multi-Agent Trading Systems

The paper investigates how adversarial signals can infiltrate large‑language‑model (LLM) based multi‑agent trading systems through the agents’ communication channels. By restricting the attacker to realistic inputs—source data and prompts—it studies role‑specific attacks on four functional roles (Analyst, Researcher, Trader, Risk Manager) and evaluates four communication topologies under data‑ and agent‑level attacks. Experiments across multiple assets, backbones, and target directions show that no architecture is inherently robust, highlighting the need for safer designs in agentic trading systems.

By CheolWon Na, Hao Ni, Lukasz Szpruch, Zhangyang Wang, Dhagash Mehta, Saurabh Nagrecha, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Chanyeol Choi, Yongjae Lee, Jee-Hyong Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Collective Loss of Control in LLM Agent Systems: An Epidemic Account of Mutation, Contagion, and Recovery

The paper proposes an epidemic model to explain how a multi‑agent system can shift from a single accidental deviation to a collective loss of control. It identifies accidental mutation, contagion through communication, and recovery as key mechanisms, and demonstrates that unsafe trajectories can spread rapidly among agents, leading to high harm rates in injected scenarios. The study also highlights the importance of auditing communication paths and strengthening both prevention and recovery measures to mitigate such risks.

By Xiangfan Wu, Zonghao Ying, Huiyu Wu, Xing Zheng, Huangsheng Cheng, Xiaorong Shi, Jing Guo