CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. Central to MAS is the communication topology which governs how agents exchange information internally. Consequently, the security of communication topologies has attracted increasing attention. In this paper, we investigate a critical privacy risk: MAS communication topologies can be inferred under a restrictive black-box setting, exposing system vulnerabilities and posing significant intellectual property threats. To explore this risk, we propose Communication Inference Attack (CIA), a novel attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents' reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the proposed global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. Extensive experiments on MAS with optimized communication topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of CIA, achieving an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC of up to 0.99, thereby revealing the substantial privacy risk in MAS.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 13 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2026.
Builds on
13 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025A Survey of LLM-Driven AI Agent Communication: Protocols, Security Risks, and Defense Countermeasures24 Jun
- 2025Commercial LLM Agents Are Already Vulnerable to Simple Yet Dangerous Attacks12 Feb
- 2024Prompt Infection: LLM-to-LLM Prompt Injection within Multi-Agent Systems9 Oct
Other references · 10
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- 2024On the Resilience of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration with Faulty Agentscited by 92
- 2025LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directionscited by 49
- 2023SurrealDriver: Designing LLM-powered Generative Driver Agent Framework based on Human Drivers' Driving-thinking Datacited by 24
- 2025Graph-Augmented Large Language Model Agents: Current Progress and Future Prospectscited by 14
- 2025From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulationcited by 8
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 5
- 2026Agent Harness Distillation: Inference-Time Harness Extraction and Exploitation in Autonomous Multi-Agent Systemscited by 1
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systemscited by 1
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systems1 Sep 2026
- 2026Agent Harness Distillation: Inference-Time Harness Extraction and Exploitation in Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems30 Jul 2026
- 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation9 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
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