The rapid adoption of agentic AI, powered by large language models (LLMs), is
transforming enterprise ecosystems with autonomous agents that execute complex
workflows. Yet we observe several key security vulnerabilities in LLM-driven
multi-agent systems (MASes): fragmented identity frameworks, insecure
communication channels, and inadequate defenses against Byzantine agents or
adversarial prompts. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of
these emerging multi-agent risks and explain why the legacy security strategies
cannot effectively address these risks. Afterwards, we propose BlockA2A, the
first unified multi-agent trust framework that enables secure and verifiable
and agent-to-agent interoperability. At a high level, BlockA2A adopts
decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to enable fine-grained cross-domain agent
authentication, blockchain-anchored ledgers to enable immutable auditability,
and smart contracts to dynamically enforce context-aware access control
policies. BlockA2A eliminates centralized trust bottlenecks, ensures message
authenticity and execution integrity, and guarantees accountability across
agent interactions. Furthermore, we propose a Defense Orchestration Engine
(DOE) that actively neutralizes attacks through real-time mechanisms, including
Byzantine agent flagging, reactive execution halting, and instant permission
revocation. Empirical evaluations demonstrate BlockA2A's effectiveness in
neutralizing prompt-based, communication-based, behavioral and systemic MAS
attacks. We formalize its integration into existing MAS and showcase a
practical implementation for Google's A2A protocol. Experiments confirm that
BlockA2A and DOE operate with sub-second overhead, enabling scalable deployment
in production LLM-based MAS environments.