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Emergent effects can arise in multi-agent systems (MAS) where execution is decentralized and reliant on local information. These effects may range from minor deviations in behavior to catastrophic system failures. To formally define these…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Philipp Altmann , Julian Schönberger , Steffen Illium , Maximilian Zorn , Fabian Ritz , Tom Haider , Simon Burton , Thomas Gabor

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, yet the tension between mutual trust and security remains underexplored. We introduce and empirically validate the Trust-Vulnerability Paradox (TVP): increasing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zijie Xu , Minfeng Qi , Shiqing Wu , Lefeng Zhang , Qiwen Wei , Han He , Ningran Li

Tool-using language agents turn model decisions into external side effects: they read files, run scripts, call APIs, send messages, and invoke Model Context Protocol tools. This makes agent attacks different from jailbreaks. The harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Suliu Qin , Haomin Zhuang , Yujun Zhou , Yufei Han , Xiangliang Zhang

How to evaluate Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a critical problem that is discussed and unsolved for a long period. In the research of narrow AI, this seems not a severe problem, since researchers in that field focus on some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Bowen Xu , Quansheng Ren

As organizations move toward production deployments of AI agents, which execute non-deterministic workflows, maintain stateful sessions, and often operate with privileged access to internal services, the engineering challenge shifts from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Nikita Benkovich , Vitalii Valkov

AI agents increasingly act through external tools: they query databases, execute shell commands, read and write files, and send network requests. Yet in most current agent stacks, model-generated tool calls are handed to the execution layer…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Aojie Yuan , Zhiyuan Su , Yue Zhao

This position paper argues that enforcing LLM agent safety within a single abstraction layer is not merely suboptimal but categorically insufficient for deployed LLM agents -- a structural consequence of how agent execution works, not a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 S. Bensalem , Y. Dong , M. Franzle , X. Huang , J. Kroger , D. Nickovic , A. Nouri , R. Roy , C. Wu

We study a class of emergent misalignment in multi-agent systems (MAS), with a focus on automated workflows, which we refer to agentic misalignment. Although these systems can solve complex tasks, they often fail because agents act…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenqian Ye , Bo Yuan , Zhichao Xu , Yijun Tian , Yawei Wang , Henry Kautz , Aidong Zhang

Agentic language-model systems increasingly rely on mutable execution contexts, including files, memory, tools, skills, and auxiliary artifacts, creating security risks beyond explicit user prompts. This paper presents DeepTrap, an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hongwei Yao , Yiming Liu , Yiling He , Bingrun Yang

The rapid rise of AI agents presents urgent challenges in authentication, authorization, and identity management. Current agent-centric protocols (like MCP) highlight the demand for clarified best practices in authentication and…

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly issue API calls that mutate real systems, yet many current architectures pass stochastic model outputs directly to execution layers. We argue that this coupling creates a safety risk because…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Jun He , Deying Yu

Computer-use agents have rapidly improved on real-world tasks such as web navigation, desktop automation, and software interaction, in some cases surpassing human performance. Yet even when the task and model are unchanged, an agent that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega , Saaket Agashe , Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Xin Eric Wang

Large-scale web applications are widely deployed with complex third-party components, inheriting security risks arising from component vulnerabilities. Security assessment is therefore required to determine whether such known…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruozhao Yang , Mingfei Cheng , Gelei Deng , Junjie Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Xiaofei Xie

LLM agents increasingly run inside execution harnesses that dispatch tools, allocate resources, and route messages between specialized components. However, a harness can return a correct, benign answer over a trajectory that accesses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chengzhi Liu , Yichen Guo , Yepeng Liu , Yuzhe Yang , Qianqi Yan , Xuandong Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Sheng Liu , Sharon Li , Yuheng Bu , Xin Eric Wang

Generative AI systems are increasingly used not only to produce content but also to retrieve data, invoke tools, and execute actions. This work examines the security and safety implications of that shift across content-level, model-level,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zelin Zhang , Qi Li , Jie Cao , Lingshuang Liu , Jianbing Ni

Multi-agent cyber-physical systems are present in a variety of applications. Agent decision-making can be affected due to errors induced by uncertain, dynamic operating environments or due to incorrect actions taken by an agent. When an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-29 Luyao Niu , Hongchao Zhang , Dinuka Sahabandu , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Radha Poovendran

AI agents are increasingly used to solve complex, multi-step tasks, but existing multi-agent frameworks remain brittle as workflows grow in scale and depth. Small errors at intermediate stages can propagate through agent interactions, while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andy Xu , Yu-Wing Tai

The rise of autonomous AI agents exposes a fundamental flaw in API-centric architectures: probabilistic systems directly execute state mutations without sufficient context, coordination, or safety guarantees. We introduce OpenKedge, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Jun He , Deying Yu

We take the position that agent security must be approached as a systems problem: the AI model powering the agent must be treated as an untrusted component, and security invariants must be enforced at the system level. Through this lens,…

Current agentic AI architectures are fundamentally incompatible with the security and epistemological requirements of high-stakes scientific workflows. The problem is not inadequate alignment or insufficient guardrails, it is architectural:…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Manish Bhattarai , Minh Vu