提出HARP方法,量化多智能体系统中危害的传播与放大效应。
HARP: Measuring Harm Amplification in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

- 通过对比正常与扰动执行,追踪各环节输出与行为变化。
- 单个专家被攻破时危害放大最显著,共享上下文污染攻击成功率最高。
- 适合安全评估、系统设计者关注危害传播机制。
多智能体大模型系统通过分解工作流至多个智能体、工具、共享上下文、记忆和决策门实现模块化,提升可解释性,但也带来传播风险:局部扰动可能被其他智能体重复利用并放大为系统级危害。本文提出HARP(Harm Amplification through Role Perturbation),一种以追踪为核心的分析方法,用于研究多智能体系统中从局部到全局的危害放大。HARP对比成对的干净与扰动执行,记录专家输出、工具调用、内存读写、守卫事件、验证日志、延迟、令牌成本及决策。定义局部危害为特定智能体或通道的偏差,全局危害为完整执行轨迹的偏离,危害放大率 = H_global / H_local。该指标补充了攻击成功率,衡量编排机制将危害扩散的程度。我们在一个面向金融领域的七智能体系统中实现HARP,采用确定性决策门和可配置攻击框架,涵盖专家劫持、串谋、共享上下文污染、时间或内存持久性攻击。五种防御策略测试显示:仅提示的防御保留良性效用但存在高成功率与隐蔽性;预工具和步骤级防护可减少部分失败,但带来效用或延迟代价;IntegrityGuard(基于轨迹一致性的防御)达到最低攻击成功率与全局危害,但存在效用/成本权衡。结果表明:单个专家被攻破导致最强危害放大,共享上下文污染产生最高攻击成功率,时间持久性引发最大恶意影响。研究强调,安全评估必须不仅关注绕过,更需测量危害传播。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-agent LLM systems decompose workflows across agents, tools, shared context, memory, and decision gates. This modularity improves interpretability, but creates a propagation risk: a bounded perturbation to one component can be reused by other agents and amplified into system-level harm. We introduce HARP (Harm Amplification through Role Perturbation), a trace-first methodology for studying local-to-global harm amplification in multi-agent LLM systems. HARP compares paired clean and perturbed executions and records specialist outputs, tool calls, memory reads/writes, guard events, oracle logs, latency, token cost, and decisions. We define local harm as deviation from targeted agents or corrupted channels, global harm as deviation over the full trace, and harm amplification as (H_global/H_local). This complements attack success rate with a measure of how strongly orchestration spreads harm beyond the attack point. We instantiate HARP in a finance-oriented seven-agent system with a deterministic decision gate and configurable attack harness for specialist compromise, collusion, shared-context corruption, and temporal or memory-persistent attacks. Across five defenses, prompt-only defenses preserve benign utility but leave high success and stealth; pre-tool and step-level guards reduce some failures with utility or latency costs; and IntegrityGuard, a trace-consistency defense, achieves the lowest attack success and global harm but introduces utility/cost trade-offs. Results show that single-specialist compromise produces the strongest amplification, shared-context corruption yields the highest attack success, and temporal persistence produces the largest malicious impact. HARP argues that secure multi-agent evaluation must measure not only bypass, but propagation.
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