The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Secure
About
Multi-agent systems extend large language models (LLMs) by decomposing tasks among specialized agents, but their distributed decision process creates new attack surfaces. We identify semantic hijacking, an attack in which harmful requests are concealed within domain-specific narratives and propagated to a Manager through Worker reports, without any syntactic injection primitives. Across 42,000 adversarial trials over 12 Manager models and 7 Worker configurations, we uncover a capability paradox: as Worker capability increases, the mean system-level Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases from 18.4% to 63.9%, peaking at 94.4%. To explain this effect, we conduct multi-level mediation analysis on two independent datasets (47,807 interactions). This analysis shows that this paradox is driven by linguistic certainty: stronger Workers are more likely to interpret adversarial narratives as legitimate, convey their conclusions assertively, and thereby lead Managers to treat such confident endorsements as justification to execute. In our larger Worker-Only setting ($n_W$=14), certainty mediates 74% of the effect, with 95% confidence intervals (CI) excluding zero under both Monte Carlo and cluster bootstrap; the smaller Full-MAS setting ($n_W$ =6) shows a directionally consistent indirect effect. Worker-side safety prompting does not reliably mitigate this failure. Building on the mediation finding, we propose heterogeneous ensemble verification, which pairs Workers of asymmetric domain competence so their complementary vulnerabilities break the certainty-to-execution chain, reducing ASR from 52.8% to 2.0% with negligible benign-task impact. Our results show that upgrading components to stronger models can actively degrade system security, and that effective defenses require exploiting--rather than eliminating--capability asymmetries between agents.