Counter-Swarm Doctrine: Containing Coordinated Agent Intrusions

Abstract:Agents can turn shared infrastructure into a channel for coordinated intrusion. The Hugging Face incident and a separate public-wiki investigation show why a security assessment may need evidence from several executions and the artifacts they leave behind. We argue that the operational unit of defence should be a revisable coordination episode linking observed transfers, task authority, and response history. The central research problem is prospective episode discovery: finding which actions belong together before an evaluator supplies their membership. We define unsanctioned coordination relative to collaboration and delegated-authority policy, connect storage-mediated coordination to stigmergy, and specify the evidence needed to distinguish influence from common causes. First-contact signals are one possible input to discovery; the design also follows inherited state and later use. A proposed evaluation compares isolated actions, rolling windows, known groups, and prospectively discovered episodes at matched review cost and false-alert workload. It measures harmful outcomes across all assigned population runs and tests recurrence after channel closure and state quarantine. A checksum-verified reconstruction of the public wiki export separates the decline in retained writes from later administrative cleanup. The contribution is an incident-grounded position, descriptive analysis, and evaluation design. It makes the recommendation to monitor across executions testable without claiming a new detector or a measured containment benefit.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2609.06140 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2609.06140v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.06140 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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