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Multi-Agent Architecture
A multi-agent architecture that extends ADT to operate as distributed, collaborative defensive systems with formal protocols for coordination, consensus, and collective action.
Context
Modern infrastructure requires defense that spans heterogeneous domains and coordinates distributed actions.
A single model cannot maintain deep expertise across cloud, identity, network, endpoint, and application domains simultaneously.
Modern attacks traverse domain boundaries. Partial containment that addresses only one domain leaves attackers with continued access.
Distributed actuation requires temporal coordination, causal consistency, rollback coordination, and blast radius containment.
Agent Types
Each CDA agent maintains deep domain expertise while contributing to unified threat models.
User and service account behavior, authentication patterns, privilege usage, and access anomalies.
IAM policies, resource configurations, control plane activity, and cloud-native threats.
Flow patterns, connection anomalies, lateral movement indicators, and traffic analysis.
Process behavior, file system activity, execution patterns, and endpoint persistence.
API usage, data access patterns, business logic anomalies, and application-layer attacks.
Protocols
Formal protocols governing agent coordination within the CDA framework.
New agents register with the collective through capability advertisement, policy acknowledgment, health commitment, and integration testing.
Agents share threat hypotheses with structured messages including threat description, confidence assessment, supporting evidence, and expected confirmation/refutation.
Collective threat assessment follows three phases: hypothesis aggregation, evidence evaluation with weighted confidence, and consensus decision with dissent preservation.
Coordinated response follows delegation protocols ensuring temporal ordering, causal consistency, and rollback capability across distributed environments.
End-to-end coordination flows demonstrating CDA capabilities.
An attacker compromises identity, escalates cloud privileges, moves laterally through networks, and establishes endpoint persistence. CDA agents coordinate to detect the complete trajectory and execute simultaneous containment.
Ransomware deploys simultaneously across multiple endpoints with C2 communication through cloud services. CDA coordinates simultaneous isolation, blocking, and resource suspension.
Compromised software update deploys with malicious behavior manifesting differently across domains. CDA coordinates deployment halt and rollback.
Threat Model
Adversary capabilities specific to multi-agent defensive systems.
Agent Compromise: Attackers may compromise individual agents through supply chain, runtime exploitation, or credential theft
Consensus Manipulation: Flooding with false hypotheses, exploiting confidence aggregation, targeting dissent suppression
Coordination Interference: Network partitioning, message delay/reordering, protocol exploitation, resource exhaustion
Cascade Failures: Exploiting action dependencies, triggering false positives, creating conflicting hypotheses