connectonion 0.6.2__py3-none-any.whl → 0.6.4__py3-none-any.whl

connectonion/docs/archive/threat-model.md

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+# Multi‑Agent Collaboration Threat Model (Top 10)
+
+## 1) Capability Fraud
+
+- Scenario: An agent claims high‑quality capability (e.g., translation) but actually uses low‑quality/free backends.
+- Real cases:
+  - Claims “GPT‑4” but actually uses GPT‑3.5
+  - Claims medical competence without relevant training
+  - Claims originality but outputs plagiarized mashups
+- Why critical:
+  - Easy to execute (change description only)
+  - Hard to verify (deep testing required)
+  - Strong economic incentive (adverse selection)
+  - Already widespread in today’s API market
+- Impact: Task failure, data leakage, financial loss, collapse of trust
+
+## 2) Data Harvesting
+
+- Scenario: Malicious agents offer free/cheap services to harvest data.
+- Real cases:
+  - “Free” translation logs all business docs
+  - Image processing stores all uploads
+  - Code assistants collect proprietary algorithms
+- Why dangerous:
+  - Users unaware; high data value; scales easily; hard to trace
+- Impact: Trade secret leakage, privacy violations, IP theft, loss of competitiveness
+
+## 3) Cost Manipulation
+
+- Scenario: Malicious agents trigger high‑cost operations to drain resources.
+- Real cases:
+  - Infinite loops, oversized inputs, recursive call chains
+  - Inducing expensive third‑party API calls
+- Why realistic:
+  - Exploits metered billing
+  - Hard to distinguish malicious vs. normal
+  - Can cause rapid, large losses
+  - Defenses can impair normal use
+- Impact: Large bills, outages, resource exhaustion, budget overruns
+
+## 4) Collusion Attacks
+
+- Scenario: Multiple agents collude to fabricate validation and deceive the system.
+- Real cases:
+  - Fake review networks; mutual endorsements; consensus manipulation
+  - Synthetic market signals
+- Why hard:
+  - Resembles normal network effects
+  - Distributed collaboration is hard to detect
+  - Evades simple verification
+  - Social‑engineering component
+- Impact: Market manipulation, trust failure, wrong decisions, systemic risk
+
+## 5) Prompt Poisoning
+
+- Scenario: Malicious instructions embedded in normal inputs alter agent behavior.
+- Real cases:
+  - Control directives embedded in text to translate
+  - Context hijacking; jailbreaks; persistent backdoors
+- Why common:
+  - Inherent LLM weakness; hard to fully filter; covert propagation; very low cost
+- Impact: Loss of control, boundary bypass, cross‑agent contamination, integrity breach
+
+## 6) Service Degradation
+
+- Scenario: Agent gradually lowers quality, then ransoms access after lock‑in.
+- Real cases:
+  - High quality at first, then degrade; fail at critical times; “maintenance” outages; paywalls to restore
+- Why insidious:
+  - Boiling‑frog pattern; switching cost exploitation; timing for max damage; monopoly‑like behavior
+- Impact: Business interruption, forced payments, high migration cost, missed windows
+
+## 7) Identity Theft
+
+- Scenario: Malicious agent impersonates a trusted/known one.
+- Real cases:
+  - Fake “official” services; clones of popular OSS; counterfeit CAs; mimicking behavior of famous agents
+- Why easy:
+  - No global identity; users can’t easily verify; behavior can be mimicked; brand trust is exploitable
+- Impact: User fraud, brand damage, misattribution, legal exposure
+
+## 8) Supply Chain Poisoning
+
+- Scenario: Attack upstream dependencies (models, data, libs, endpoints).
+- Real cases:
+  - Tainted training data; swapped model weights; modified libraries; hijacked APIs
+- Why severe:
+  - Affects all downstream; hard to detect; long‑lived; costly to remediate
+- Impact: Massive leaks, systemic bias, backdoors, cascading failures
+
+## 9) Privacy Inference
+
+- Scenario: Repeated interactions allow inference of sensitive information.
+- Real cases:
+  - Inferring business plans from translation jobs
+  - Deriving algorithms from code completions
+  - Building user profiles from Q&A history; side‑channel analysis
+- Why covert:
+  - Each request looks benign; value emerges from aggregation; users unaware; regulatory grey areas
+- Impact: Privacy leaks, competitive intel theft, profiling markets, targeted attacks
+
+## 10) Dependency Hijacking
+
+- Scenario: Free/cheap at first; once dependent, sudden price hikes or shutdowns.
+- Real cases:
+  - 10× price hike; key features paywalled; export disabled; forced incompatible upgrades
+- Why real:
+  - Common online business tactic; exploits switching costs; data lock‑in; time pressure
+- Impact: Budget blow‑outs, forced rewrites, continuity risk, weak bargaining position
+
+---
+
+## Severity Matrix
+
+```
+High Probability + High Impact (prioritize):
+├── Capability Fraud
+├── Data Harvesting
+└── Cost Manipulation
+
+High Probability + Medium Impact:
+├── Prompt Poisoning
+├── Service Degradation
+└── Identity Theft
+
+Low Probability + High Impact:
+├── Collusion Attacks
+├── Supply Chain Poisoning
+└── Dependency Hijacking
+
+Persistent Threat:
+└── Privacy Inference (cumulative)
+```
+
+---
+
+## Key Insights
+
+1) Economic incentives dominate — if profitable, it will happen.
+2) Trust asymmetry is the root vulnerability — claims are cheap, verification is costly.
+3) Scale amplifies risk — automation makes attacks zero‑marginal to millions.
+4) Compositions are more dangerous — combined attacks cause cascading failures.
+5) Defense cost vs. payoff — “perfect” defense is often uneconomic; aim for “good enough”.
+6) Simplicity‑first and strong defaults reduce attack surface — fewer concepts/configs/states.
+7) Local‑first, minimal exposure — stay close to data/caller; limit public attack surface.
+8) Experience‑driven local trust beats global reputation — personal success/failure is harder to game.
+9) Explainability and reproducibility — pin versions/hashes; surface “why this was selected”.
+10) Test‑before‑trust + continuous spot‑checks — one‑time tests aren’t enough; random small samples over time.
+11) Fast recovery over zero‑failure — isolate impact, support rollback and cheap alternatives.
+
+---
+
+## Defensive Principles (Not to block all attacks, but to make them unprofitable)
+
+- Make attack cost > payoff
+- Keep damage bounded and recoverable
+- Ensure actions are auditable
+- Grow antifragility under pressure
+
+Core strategies:
+- Economic alignment: make honesty more profitable
+- Transparent auditing: leave malicious action no cover
+- Risk dispersion: avoid single points of dependence
+- Rapid recovery: accept failure, recover fast