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         article-type="Research Paper"
         xml:lang="en">
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>NFSU Journal of Forensic Science</journal-title>
        <abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">nfsujfs</abbrev-journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">3049-2408</issn>
      <publisher>
        <publisher-name>Prof. (Dr.) Naveen Kumar Chaudhary</publisher-name>
      </publisher>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">nfsujfs330056</article-id>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Detecting Adversarial Agents in Telecom Financial Networks Through Inter-Agent (A2A) Communication Behaviour)</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <name>
            <surname>Mohan Srivastava</surname>
            <given-names>Aditya</given-names>
          </name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1"/>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <name>
            <surname>Charanarur</surname>
            <given-names>Panem</given-names>
          </name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1"/>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <name>
            <surname>Kumar Chaudhary</surname>
            <given-names>Naveen</given-names>
          </name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1"/>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <name>
            <surname>Lokesh Chouhan</surname>
            <given-names>Dr.</given-names>
          </name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1"/>
        </contrib>
      </contrib-group>
      <aff id="aff1">National Forensic Sciences University</aff>
      <pub-date pub-type="epub" iso-8601-date="2026-09-24">
        <month>09</month>
        <day>24</day>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>3</volume>
      <issue>4</issue>
      <fpage>12</fpage>
      <lpage>28</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>As financial ecosystems migrate toward an architecture composed of autonomous software
agents representing banks, telecom operators, payment processors, and end users. The communication
channels between these agents become high-value targets for adversarial exploitation. Conventional
fraud detectors operate on transaction-level attributes such as amount and type, and are blind to the
behavioural signatures embedded in inter-agent message exchange. This paper proposes a detection
framework that extracts twelve communication behavioral features (response time, message length, retry
count, session anomaly score, authentication failure rate, interaction frequency, and others) from agentto-agent (A2A) traffic and feeds them through a two stage pipeline: (i) an autoencoder trained
exclusively on legitimate interactions to produce an eight dimensional latent embedding and a scalar
reconstruction error anomaly score, and (ii) an XGBoost classifier that operates on the 21 dimensional
fusion of raw and autoencoder derived features. We evaluate the system on PaySim, a widely used
financial dataset containing 6.36 million records, under a deliberately balanced protocol (50/50 fraudlegitimate split) that avoids the metric inflation common in imbalanced evaluations. Across six distinct
attack types : (i) impersonation (ii) prompt injection (iii) collusion (iv) trust-chain exploitation (v) data
exfiltration, and (vi) transaction manipulation. The proposed framework attains an F1-score of 0.933,
AUC-ROC of 0.983, and per-attack F1 ranging from 0.928 (collusion, the stealthiest category) to 1.000
(transaction manipulation). A complementary four-tier graduated mitigation strategy
(Monitor/Throttle/Quarantine/Block) achieves 93.52% fraud prevention, marginally exceeding binary
blocking (93.27%) while reducing friction for legitimate users by 30%. We discuss the implications for emerging agent-to-agent (A2A) ecosystems expected in 2028 and beyond, in which autonomous AI
agents will negotiate, transact, and settle on behalf of human principals without direct human oversight.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group kwd-group-type="author">
        <kwd>multi-agent systems</kwd>
        <kwd>agent-to-agent communication</kwd>
        <kwd>fraud detection</kwd>
        <kwd>autoencoder</kwd>
        <kwd>XGBoost</kwd>
        <kwd>adversarial attacks</kwd>
        <kwd>graduated mitigation</kwd>
        <kwd>telecommunications security</kwd>
        <kwd>agentic A</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
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