Lie Rarely, Lie Big: Stealthy Insider Attacks on LLM Robot Teams

Abstract

When a team of robots delegates planning and mutual trust to LLM agents, a single compromised robot can corrupt the shared outcome. We study this threat in a grounded task: a multi-robot survey in which measurements can be verified against the physical world, but every verification costs budget that would otherwise advance the mission. We treat the compromised robot as a stealthy adversary in the system-theoretic sense: it is limited not by an energy bound but by the team's own detectors. We then derive two bounds. First, the probability that the adversary's reports are verified is bounded below in terms of the degrees in the communication graph and the verification budget. Second, the map error caused by any stealthy adversary is bounded above by the value of a linear program over the adversary's bias distributions; its solution is an exchange rate between stealth budget and damage: below a critical verification level the worst stealthy attack tells rare, full-magnitude lies on the records least likely to be verified, and above it the better purchase is small biases hidden in the noise. In experiments where the honest robots are LLM agents, both bounds hold at the budget the attack actually spent. The experiments also show that which records an LLM robot re-checks is unbiased, but how much it re-checks is unpredictable.