Agentic-SecPBFT: Agentic AI-Driven Proactive Security Framework for Wireless PBFT Consensus in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Haoxiang Luo, Yinqiu Liu, Ruichen Zhang, Guangyuan Liu, Gang Sun, Hongfang Yu, Zhu Han, Dong In Kim

The standard Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol, designed for stable, wired environments, exhibits critical vulnerabilities when deployed in settings like mobile ad-hoc networks, thus making it susceptible to sophisticated threats such as Sybil attacks, Byzantine collusion, and message manipulation. Existing static defense mechanisms are ill-equipped to handle the intelligent and coordinated nature of these attacks. To address this challenge, this paper leverages the Agentic AI paradigm to build a distributed multi-agent system in which each consensus node is equipped with an intelligent agent. These agents employ a hierarchical Multi-Agent Deep Q-Network (MADQN) algorithm to learn and execute proactive security policies in real-time. By observing local network behavior, message consistency, and dynamically maintained reputation scores, the agents collaboratively identify suspicious behavior and recommend defensive actions under standard PBFT quorum and membership rules, thereby improving the integrity of the consensus process. We refer to the resulting framework as Agentic-SecPBFT. Then, we formally model key attack vectors and conduct extensive simulations. The results demonstrate that Agentic-SecPBFT reaches a 95.0% attack detection rate with a 1.8% false positive rate. Compared with mainstream PBFT variants, it achieves 3.1* higher throughput with 56% lower latency on average under 33% malicious nodes, offering a robust and adaptive security solution for decentralized wireless systems.