In multi-agent systems, a small number of communication channels often control most of the attack surface—MESA can identify these critical edges proactively, letting defenders protect 3x more attacks with the same security budget.
This paper introduces MESA, a framework for identifying which communication channels in multi-agent systems are most critical to protect. By analyzing graph structure and testing channel importance without needing attack data, MESA ranks edges by their security risk, helping defenders focus limited resources on the most vulnerable connections before attacks happen.