分布式后门攻击可躲过局部监控,因每部分都看似正常。
When Local Monitors Miss Compositional Harm: Diagnosing Distributed Backdoors in Multi-Agent Systems
- 将恶意指令拆分到多个智能体,使每步检查都通过
- 局部监控在无异常痕迹时无法发现攻击,即使强检测器也无效
- 需在关键表示层才能暴露攻击结构,适合安全研究人员
随着多智能体工具使用大模型系统部署,常见的安全机制是运行时监控器对每条消息、工具调用或步骤进行独立检查。本文揭示该机制存在根本漏洞:分布式后门将恶意载荷分散至多个智能体,各片段单独通过本地检查,但组合后形成攻击。监控器每一步判断正确,仍可能遗漏攻击。问题不在于拆分本身,而在于碎片化后的局部表现完全良性,难以识别。我们提出‘可观测边界’概念:监控器仅能识别与良性流量可区分的信号。证明一旦碎片在监控视图中表现正常,无论检测器多么强大,都无法捕捉。在控制测试环境、外部基准和端到端智能体运行中,局部监控的失效恰与局部证据消失同步,仅当看到组装对象时信号才恢复。仅在良性数据上训练的监控器,在未见编码下仍可恢复攻击代码结构(平均AUROC 0.874)。给定编码族的解码视图门控可阻断所有测试攻击。但视野更广未必足够:全轨迹监控和解码器若未触及载荷暴露的表示层,仍会失败。当危害具有组合性时,局部安全不等于全局安全,核心挑战在于定位该表示层。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As multi-agent, tool-using LLM systems are deployed, a common safety net is a runtime monitor that checks each message, tool call, or step on its own. We show this net has a fundamental hole. A distributed backdoor splits a harmful payload across agents, so every local check passes while the assembled object is the attack. The monitor can be right on every step and still miss the attack. The problem is not splitting itself: split fragments can still leak suspicious tokens or provenance edges. The hard case is \emph{local benignness}. No fragment carries the harm, and what is left looks like ordinary benign traffic. We formalize this as an \emph{observability boundary}: a monitor catches only what its view can tell apart from benign traffic. We prove that once the fragments look benign in the monitored view, no detector on that view can catch them, however strong it is. Across a controlled testbed, an external benchmark, and end-to-end agent runs, local monitors lose the signal exactly as local evidence disappears, and it returns only when the monitor sees the assembled object. A monitor trained only on benign traffic recovers the attack's code structure across held-out encodings (0.874 mean AUROC). A decoded-view gate, given the encoding family, blocks every tested attack. But seeing more is not enough: full-trace monitors and decoders still fail unless they reach the representation where the payload is exposed. Local safety is not global safety when harm is compositional, and the open problem is finding that representation.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。