An Agentic Multi-Agent Architecture for Cybersecurity Risk Management

Agentic systems are rapidly moving to production, where they read untrusted inputs, call tools with real permissions, and act autonomously, expanding the security surface beyond chat-only models. Yet standard evaluations remain single-turn and fail to capture multi-step agent vulnerabilities. We present a systematic black-box framework for risk-aware agent evaluation requiring only basic system descriptions. Our approach introduces: (1) a seven-domain taxonomy mapping observable behaviors to risk categories, (2) fully automated SAGE-RT red teaming producing 120 adversarial scenarios per domain, and (3) human-validated evaluation using LLM judges. Empirical validation across two agent architectures (CrewAI and AutoGen) with four base models reveals alarming patterns: 56.25% average governance risk, 65% privacy risk in multi-agent configurations, and agent behavior vulnerabilities reaching 85%. Our black-box approach effectively identifies critical architectural vulnerabilities without privileged access, providing a scalable path toward safer agent deployments.

Multi-agent artificial intelligence systems or MAS are systems of autonomous agents that exercise delegated tool authority, share persistent memory, and coordinate via inter-agent communication. MAS introduces qualitatively distinct security vulnerabilities from those documented for singular AI models. Existing security and governance frameworks were not designed for these emerging attack surfaces. This study systematically characterizes the threat landscape of MAS and quantitatively evaluates 16 security frameworks for AI against it. A four-phase methodology is proposed: constructing a deep technical knowledge base of production multi-agent architectures; conducting generative AI-assisted threat modeling scoped to MAS cybersecurity risks and validated by domain experts; structuring survey plans at individual-threat granularity; and scoring each framework on a three-point scale against the cybersecurity risks. The risks were organized into 193 distinct main threat items across nine risk categories. The expected minimal average score is 2. No reviewed framework achieves majority coverage of any single category. Non-Determinism (mean score 1.231 across all 16 frameworks) and Data Leakage (1.340) are the most under-addressed domains. The OWASP Agentic Security Initiative leads overall at 65.3% coverage and in the design phase; the CDAO Generative AI Responsible AI Toolkit leads in development and operational coverage. These results provide the first empirical cross-framework comparison for MAS security and offer evidence-based guidance for framework selection. Please check back for information on the published journal version.

The rapid evolution of sophisticated cyberattacks has strained modern Security Operations Centers (SOC), which traditionally rely on rule-based or signature-driven detection systems. These legacy frameworks often generate high volumes of technical alerts that lack organizational context, leading to analyst fatigue and delayed incident responses. This paper presents LiaisonAgent, an autonomous multi-agent system designed to bridge the gap between technical risk detection and business-level risk governance. Built upon the QWQ-32B large reasoning model, LiaisonAgent integrates specialized sub-agents, including human-computer interaction agents, comprehensive judgment agents, and automated disposal agents-to execute end-to-end investigation workflows. The system leverages a hybrid planning architecture that combines deterministic workflows for compliance with autonomous reasoning based on the ReAct paradigm to handle ambiguous operational scenarios. Experimental evaluations across diverse security contexts, such as large-scale data exfiltration and unauthorized account borrowing, achieve an end-to-end tool-calling success rate of 97.8% and a risk judgment accuracy of 95%. Furthermore, the system exhibits significant resilience against out-of-distribution noise and adversarial prompt injections, while achieving a 92.7% reduction in manual investigation overhead.