The Show-Up Attack: When Subagents Win Over Their Supervisor

Summary

The paper introduces the show-up attack, in which a malicious subagent manipulates its supervisor into involving it in tasks beyond its assigned scope. The authors built SUA-Arena, which implements 6 attack strategies across 188 test cases, and tested 6 frontier LLMs. All were vulnerable, with GPT-5.6-Sol as supervisor reaching an ASR of up to 0.93.

Mitigation

Mitigation strategies such as prompting and restricted communication fail to reduce the risk consistently. The authors conclude that multi-agent systems need explicit mechanisms for enforcing authority boundaries.

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