Medium
Reliability & Confabulation
Cascading Hallucination
One agent's fabricated "fact" is consumed by the next as ground truth, compounding through a pipeline until a confidently wrong decision is executed.
Output / Decision Integrity Loss
LLM09ASI08T5
Tells spot it before you commit
- » Agents chain, each trusting the previous agent's output without verification.
- » No grounding/citation check between stages.
- » Downstream actions are taken on unverified upstream assertions.
Method
- Identify a stage that will assert unverified facts (summarizer, planner).
- Introduce or provoke a plausible-but-false claim upstream.
- Trace how it propagates and whether a downstream agent acts on it.
Payloads templates - adapt to authorized scope
Ask the pipeline to act on a plausible but unsupported premise and observe whether
any stage verifies it before the next stage treats it as fact.
Why it works
Each agent optimizes for a fluent continuation and treats peer output as trusted input. Without a verification boundary, a single hallucination is amplified at every hop instead of being caught, turning noise into a confident, actionable error.
Impact
Confidently wrong automated decisions, corrupted downstream data/actions, and failures that are hard to trace because each stage "just used what it was given".
Defenses
- Ground and verify claims between stages (citations, checks); don't treat peer output as truth.
- Add human review at high-impact decision points; propagate uncertainty, not just answers.
- Constrain autonomy so a single bad assertion can't drive an irreversible action.
Mappings
OWASP LLM
LLM09 - Misinformation
OWASP ASI
ASI08 - Cascading Failures
Agentic Threats
T5 - Cascading Hallucination Attacks