SwarmReconGuard: Black-Box Detection of Distributed Collective Reconnaissance by Individually Benign-Looking Agent Populations
Autonomous and agentic clients can distribute reconnaissance across many identities so that each request remains valid, low-rate, and benign-looking while the population collectively acquires broad system knowledge. We formalize this threat as Distributed Collective Reconnaissance (DCR) and present SwarmReconGuard, a reproducible black-box benchmark in which the defender observes only service-boundary telemetry. The Docker-isolated study evaluates 11 benign and attack behaviors across 10-10,000 virtual identities, comprising 440 test runs and 3,666,300 requests, with complete telemetry integrity. We compare semantic, Gaussian, conditional, graph, kernel, hybrid, and CUSUM-based detectors. Gaussian likelihood-ratio detection achieves 100$\%$ detection with 0$\%$ observed false positives on known attacks but only 3$\%$ on unseen policies. CUSUM yields 36.1$\%$ overall detection at 1.25$\%$ false positives, while hybrid CUSUM reaches 85.7$\%$ detection with 0$\%$ observed false positives at 10,000 identities. Results expose a major policy-generalization gap and motivate exposure-aware, scale-aware defenses.