mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Agent-Canary-Mas: End-to-End Evaluation of Protocol Risk in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv 2610.15529 ↗First posted 11 Oct 2026cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Agent-to-agent protocols allow LLM agents to discover peers, exchange results, and coordinate tool use. A locally successful protocol attack, however, may be rejected by a later agent or propagated into a consequential task decision. Measuring local exploitability alone leaves this difference unresolved and provides limited evidence about which participant caused the final outcome. We present Agent-Canary-Mas, an end-to-end evaluation system that follows protocol risk through long-horizon multi-agent tasks. It covers five risk classes and 13 subclasses across A2A, ANP, and BCS, with 975 matched malicious--benign task pairs in five business domains. A shared OpenClaw framework runs autonomous, tool-using agents under different underlying models while preserving the task and execution setup. Matched runs separate local protocol success from downstream consequences; retained evidence connects participant selection, message consumption, tool activity, and task-state changes. We further evaluate a protocol-context Guard that checks an object's authority at consequential handoffs. Across three model conditions, local attack success is frequently at or above 90%, while consequence conversion ranges from 7.1% to 100.0%. Cross-agent evidence raises macro-averaged Audit-F1 from 29.7% to 95.5%. On Finance tasks, the Guard lowers average ASR from 86.1% to 53.8% and PTCR from 65.5% to 31.2%, with a measurable completion tradeoff. These results show that protocol risk depends on how agents use exchanged objects throughout the task, and that evaluating this path supports more informative risk assessment, attribution, and defense.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

Builds on

36 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defense23 Jul
  2. 2026Security Threat Modeling for Emerging AI-Agent Protocols: A Comparative Analysis of MCP, A2A, Agora, and ANP11 Feb
  3. 2025MCP-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models with Real-World MCP Servers17 Dec
  4. 2025ConVerse: Benchmarking Contextual Safety in Agent-to-Agent Conversations7 Nov
  5. 2025Security Analysis of Agentic AI Communication Protocols: A Comparative Evaluation5 Nov
  6. 2025MCP Security Bench (MSB): Benchmarking Attacks Against Model Context Protocol in LLM Agents14 Oct
  7. 2025SecureWebArena: A Holistic Security Evaluation Benchmark for LVLM-based Web Agents11 Oct
  8. 2025MCPSecBench: A Systematic Security Benchmark and Playground for Testing Model Context Protocols17 Aug
  9. 2025BlockA2A: Towards Secure and Verifiable Agent-to-Agent Interoperability2 Aug
  10. 2025Towards Unifying Quantitative Security Benchmarking for Multi Agent Systems23 Jul
  11. 2025A Survey of LLM-Driven AI Agent Communication: Protocols, Security Risks, and Defense Countermeasures24 Jun
  12. 2025Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agents28 Apr
7 more
  1. 2025Les Dissonances: Cross-Tool Harvesting and Polluting in Pool-of-Tools Empowered LLM Agents4 Apr
  2. 2025Multi-Agent Systems Execute Arbitrary Malicious Code15 Mar
  3. 2025Red-Teaming LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Communication Attacks20 Feb
  4. 2025CORBA: Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models20 Feb
  5. 2025G-Safeguard: A Topology-Guided Security Lens and Treatment on LLM-based Multi-agent Systems16 Feb
  6. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
  7. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep

Other references · 17

  1. 2023NeMo Guardrails: A Toolkit for Controllable and Safe LLM Applications with Programmable Railscited by 365
  2. 2023Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defensescited by 364
  3. 2025Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directionscited by 265
  4. 2025MultiAgentBench: Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agentscited by 178
  5. 2025MCP-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Using LLM Agents with Complex Real-World Tasks via MCP Serverscited by 109
  6. 2025MCP-Universe: Benchmarking Large Language Models with Real-World Model Context Protocol Serverscited by 96
  7. 2025A Survey of AI Agent Protocolscited by 81
  8. 2024A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of Large Language Modelscited by 45
  9. 2026ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspacescited by 33
  10. 2025MCP-AgentBench: Evaluating Real-World Language Agent Performance with MCP-Mediated Toolscited by 32
  11. 2025Agent Network Protocol Technical White Papercited by 25
  12. 2026Silo-Bench: A Scalable Environment for Evaluating Distributed Coordination in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 20
5 more
  1. 2024COMMA: A Communicative Multimodal Multi-Agent Benchmarkcited by 14
  2. 2025From Glue-Code to Protocols: A Critical Analysis of A2A and MCP Integration for Scalable Agent Systemscited by 14
  3. 2026AgentCanary: A Security Evaluation Framework for Autonomous AI Agents in Real Executable Environmentscited by 13
  4. 2026ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injectioncited by 7
  5. 2026AgentRFC: Security Design Principles and Conformance Testing for Agent Protocolscited by 5

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  4. 2025Comprehensive Vulnerability Analysis is Necessary for Trustworthy LLM-MAS
  5. 2026Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents
  6. 2026AgentCollabBench: Diagnosing When Good Agents Make Bad Collaborators
  7. 2026REDAgentBench: Executable Red Teaming and Faithful Measurement of LLM Agent Systems
  8. 2026Early Detection of Distributed Backdoors in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: A Characterization Study