Illusion: Safeguarding Topology Confidentiality in LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Behavior-Preserving Obfuscation

Yiu-Fai Cheung, Hongzhi Guo, Miao Pan, Irwin King, Hao Wang

The communication topology of Large Language Model Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MASs) governs how information propagates among agents and encodes critical domain knowledge and expert workflow design. It is valuable intellectual property and plays a decisive role in system utility and safety, yet remains vulnerable to inference attacks that stealthily reconstruct it from agent outputs. Existing defenses detect or mitigate such attacks but do not proactively conceal the topology itself. We propose \textit{Illusion}, a proactive topology obfuscation defense for LLM-MAS. \textit{Illusion} injects fake edges and fake messages to present attackers with a deceptive topology, while selecting low-impact candidates that preserve output-distribution equivalence and task-accuracy non-inferiority. The resulting fake edges are designed to be indistinguishable from genuine messages under black-box observation. Extensive experiments show that \textit{Illusion} reduces edge-level F1 from over 0.87 to 0.62 and graph similarity from over 0.94 to 0.71. It also largely preserves output distributions and task performance, and its fake edges resist both similarity-based and LLM-judge filtering, even under…