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Abstract
In recent years, Large-Language-Model-driven AI agents have exhibited
unprecedented intelligence and adaptability, and are rapidly changing human
production and life. Nowadays, agents are undergoing a new round of evolution.
They no longer act as an isolated island like LLMs. Instead, they start to
communicate with diverse external entities, such as other agents and tools, to
perform more complex tasks collectively. Under this trend, agent communication
is regarded as a foundational pillar of the future AI ecosystem, and many
organizations have intensively begun to design related communication protocols
(e.g., Anthropic's MCP and Google's A2A) within the recent few months. However,
this new field exposes significant security hazards, which can cause severe
damage to real-world scenarios. To help researchers quickly figure out this
promising topic and benefit the future agent communication development, this
paper presents a comprehensive survey of agent communication security. More
precisely, we first present a clear definition of agent communication and
categorize the entire lifecycle of agent communication into three stages:
user-agent interaction, agent-agent communication, and agent-environment
communication. Next, for each communication phase, we dissect related protocols
and analyze the security risks according to the communication characteristics.
Then, we summarize and outlook on the possible defense countermeasures for each
risk. In addition, we conduct experiments using MCP and A2A to help readers
better understand the novel vulnerabilities brought by agent communication.
Finally, we discuss open issues and future directions in this promising
research field.