[2603.21194] Is Monitoring Enough? Strategic Agent Selection For Stealthy Attack in Multi-Agent Discussions

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2603.21194 (cs) [Submitted on 22 Mar 2026] Title:Is Monitoring Enough? Strategic Agent Selection For Stealthy Attack in Multi-Agent Discussions Authors:Qiuchi Xiang, Haoxuan Qu, Hossein Rahmani, Jun Liu View a PDF of the paper titled Is Monitoring Enough? Strategic Agent Selection For Stealthy Attack in Multi-Agent Discussions, by Qiuchi Xiang and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Multi-agent discussions have been widely adopted, motivating growing efforts to develop attacks that expose their vulnerabilities. In this work, we study a practical yet largely unexplored attack scenario, the discussion-monitored scenario, where anomaly detectors continuously monitor inter-agent communications and block detected adversarial messages. Although existing attacks are effective without discussion monitoring, we show that they exhibit detectable patterns and largely fail under such monitoring constraints. But does this imply that monitoring alone is sufficient to secure multi-agent discussions? To answer this question, we develop a novel attack method explicitly tailored to the discussion-monitored scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that effective attacks remain possible even under continuous monitoring, indicating that monitoring alone does not eliminate adversarial risks. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.21194 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.21194v...