多智能体系统中,安全模型组合后仍不安全,需在各环节加防护门。
ChannelGuard: Safe Models Do Not Compose into Safe Multi-Agent Systems

- 在智能体间通道设置信息瓶颈门,通过相似度匹配拦截恶意指令
- 在三种模型上实现工具污染攻击零成功(30/30),提示注入降低一半
- 无需调用大模型,可追踪攻击拦截位置,适合部署于高安全需求场景
多智能体大模型应用由规划器、执行者、验证器和合成器串联而成,各智能体间通信通道易被攻击者植入恶意指令。现有防御仅保护输入边界或依赖外部服务端过滤器,无法覆盖内部通道。我们在8类攻击、5种防御、3个模型后端的2,100条轨迹评估中发现:未受防护的系统看似完全安全(工具与内存污染攻击成功率0.000),实则几乎全靠云端服务器端过滤器支撑(Azure GPT-5中60个块中有54个依赖此机制),一旦无该过滤器,安全即转移至模型自身对齐能力。结果仅通过输出报告难以察觉。我们提出ChannelGuard——一种训练无关的纵深防御框架,在每个智能体间通道部署信息瓶颈门:基于嵌入相似性评分,决定是否放行、压缩或阻断文本,不增加大模型调用;同时通过归因方法记录攻击被拦截层。ChannelGuard在应用层实现工具输出攻击零成功(30/30),跨Azure GPT-5、Anthropic Sonnet 4.5、Haiku 4.5一致有效;提示注入成功率从0.333降至0.167,且保持GSM8K准确率不变(0.867)。白盒对抗改写可绕过所有嵌入门,但扰动投票基线表现更优。附录包含基线、消融、参数扫描、良性数据保留分析及评审员审计(kappa=0.900),总成本47.36美元。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-agent LLM applications chain a planner, worker agents, a verifier, and a synthesizer, and every hop between agents is an unmonitored channel through which an adversary can smuggle instructions. Existing defenses guard only the input boundary (IBProtector, Llama Guard, perplexity filters, SmoothLLM) or run outside the application as opaque, stochastic provider-side filters. We show this gap carries a consequence rarely measured: on a 2,100-trace evaluation across eight attack families, five defenses, and three model backends, an undefended pipeline that appears fully safe under standard reporting (attack success 0.000 on tool- and memory-poisoning) owes that safety almost entirely to the cloud provider's server-side filter (54 of 60 blocks on Azure GPT-5), and silently shifts to the agent model's own alignment on a backend without such a filter. Outcome-only reporting hides this dependence. We present ChannelGuard, a training-free defense-in-depth framework placing information-bottleneck gates on every inter-agent channel; each scores channel text against an adversarial phrase bank by embedding similarity and deterministically passes, compresses, or blocks it, adding no LLM call, while an attribution method records which layer stopped each attack. ChannelGuard's tool-output gate blocks Tool Poisoning 30 of 30 at the application layer, identically across Azure GPT-5, Anthropic Sonnet 4.5, and Anthropic Haiku 4.5, whereas the undefended pipeline shifts entirely across backends; it also lowers Prompt Injection attack success by half (0.333 to 0.167) and preserves GSM8K accuracy exactly (0.867). White-box adaptive paraphrase evades every embedding gate, where a perturb-and-vote baseline does better. An extended appendix adds baselines, ablations, sweeps, a benign-preservation analysis, and a judge audit (kappa = 0.900), at a total cost of 47.36 USD.
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