A Troublemaker with Contagious Jailbreak Makes Chaos in Honest Towns
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
With the development of large language models, they are widely used as agents in various fields. A key component of agents is memory, which stores vital information but is susceptible to jailbreak attacks. Existing research mainly focuses on single-agent attacks and shared memory attacks. However, real-world scenarios often involve independent memory. In this paper, we propose the Troublemaker Makes Chaos in Honest Town (TMCHT) task, a large-scale, multi-agent, multi-topology text-based attack evaluation framework. TMCHT involves one attacker agent attempting to mislead an entire society of agents. We identify two major challenges in multi-agent attacks: (1) Non-complete graph structure, (2) Large-scale systems. We attribute these challenges to a phenomenon we term toxicity disappearing. To address these issues, we propose an Adversarial Replication Contagious Jailbreak (ARCJ) method, which optimizes the retrieval suffix to make poisoned samples more easily retrieved and optimizes the replication suffix to make poisoned samples have contagious ability. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach in TMCHT, with 23.51%, 18.95%, and 52.93% improvements in line topology, star topology, and 100-agent settings. Encourage community attention to the security of multi-agent systems.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2024.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026Memory Poisoning Attack and Defense on Memory Based LLM-Agentscited by 40
- 2026A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecyclecited by 21
- 2026Thought Virus: Viral Misalignment via Subliminal Prompting in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 7
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 5
- 2026Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Orchestration Tracescited by 4
- 2026Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planningcited by 4
- 2026Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 3
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systemscited by 1
- 2026Catching the Infection Before It Spreads: Foresight-Guided Defense in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systems1 Sep 2026
- 2026Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems10 Aug 2026
- 2026Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning25 Jun 2026
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation9 Jun 2026
- 2026Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Orchestration Traces4 May 2026
- 2026Catching the Infection Before It Spreads: Foresight-Guided Defense in Multi-Agent Systems3 May 2026
- 2026A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle17 Apr 2026
- 2026Thought Virus: Viral Misalignment via Subliminal Prompting in Multi-Agent Systems23 Feb 2026
- 2026Memory Poisoning Attack and Defense on Memory Based LLM-Agents9 Jan 2026