On Private Knowledge Retrieval and Private Inference for secure multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems provide a convenient framework for the massive deployment of agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs). It provides a sound framework where agents can interact with existing software to perform actions in an autonomous way. Agentic AI is the new term to denote these AI-based autonomous systems. In real multi-agent systems, agents need to deal with malicious agents some of which can exploit security vulnerabilities to do harm. A memory poisoning attack is an example of exploiting a vulnerability to modify agents knowledge and, thus, affect its behavior. In an agent, there are different types of memory systems (semantic, episodic, and short-term) which have their own characteristics and for which different memory poisoning attacks may be developed. In this paper we focus on semantic memory, we discuss its attack, and mitigation strategies. We introduce private knowledge retrieval and private inference. We propose a signature system in the knowledge base to prevent from undesired manipulation. This should avoid memory poisoning attacks by introducing security by design in the construction of the semantic memory. In our architecture, an agent contains a local Prolog-like inference system (i.e., using Horn clauses to represent knowledge) which accesses an external knowledge base to get the required knowledge. This externally signed knowledge base is accessed privately. We provide different implementations in Python using different privacy levels including k-anonymity and information-theoretical privacy (IT-PIR).