MESA

MESA framework proactively ranks vulnerable communication channels in multi-agent systems

Researchers introduce MESA, a label-free framework for prioritizing security-critical communication edges in multi-agent systems (MAS) before attacks are observed. The framework combines six graph-theoretic metrics with two dynamic probes (ablation and masking) to rank edges by compromise risk, without requiring attack traces. Evaluated across three MAS scenarios, eight network topologies, and five open-source LLMs, MESA achieves mean Spearman ρ=+0.60 correlation with empirical per-edge attack success, and monitoring the top 10% of ranked edges intercepts roughly 3x more successful attacks than random allocation. The work highlights that attack impact in MAS is highly concentrated — a single compromised edge can account for up to 75% of total attack success.