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

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 22 Mar 2026] Is Monitoring Enough? Strategic Agent Selection For Stealthy Attack in Multi-Agent Discussions Qiuchi Xiang, Haoxuan Qu, Hossein Rahmani, Jun Liu 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:2603.21194v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.21194 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Qiuchi Xiang [view email] [v1] Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:28:30 UTC (6,454 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)