{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,17]],"date-time":"2026-04-17T07:16:03Z","timestamp":1776410163398,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":51,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,8]],"date-time":"2026-02-08T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1770508800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100011033","name":"Agencia Estatal de Investigaci\u00f3n","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["PID2024-158227NB-C33"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PID2024-158227NB-C33"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100011033","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100011033","name":"Agencia Estatal de Investigaci\u00f3n","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["PID2021-123673OB-C31"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PID2021-123673OB-C31"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100011033","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100003359","name":"Generalitat Valenciana","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CIPROM\/2021\/077"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CIPROM\/2021\/077"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100003359","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["JCP"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Modern cyber threats demand coordinated defensive strategies that extend beyond centralized security mechanisms. However, existing multi-agent platforms exhibit critical limitations in explicit communication and real-time coordination for cyberdefense operations. This work proposes a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for autonomous cyberdefense that addresses these limitations through structured inter-agent communication and distributed coordination. The architecture integrates a centralized monitor agent with specialized defensive swarms deployed across operational hosts. It is implemented using SPADE 4.1 (Smart Python Agent Development Environment) to enable XMPP-based (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) communication with low-latency messaging and location transparency. Four specialized swarms\u2014Network Defender, Host Defender, Anomaly Detection, and Forensic and Recovery\u2014perform autonomous defensive tasks. A secure authentication mechanism ensures trusted communication between monitor and deployer agents. The system was evaluated in a controlled virtualized environment using the Network Defender Swarm as an illustrative case. The experimental results focus on internal coordination behavior, messaging efficiency, and end-to-end detection time across increasing levels of parallelism. A scan agent scalability analysis shows that moderate parallelism (2\u201316 agents) yields the lowest Total Detection Time (12.88 s across the full TCP port range), while excessive agent counts degrade performance. Results demonstrate how the proposed architecture supports low-latency communication, efficient coordination, and parallel task execution. Message latency benchmarks show improvements compared to classical agent frameworks such as JADE. These findings provide initial evidence that communication-centric multi-agent architectures can facilitate coordinated and adaptive cyberdefense operations, while serving as a platform for further experimental evaluation.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/jcp6010028","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,9]],"date-time":"2026-02-09T09:41:02Z","timestamp":1770630062000},"page":"28","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["cyberSPADE: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Architecture for Coordinated Cyberdefense"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"6","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-5888-0870","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Luc\u00eda","family":"Alba Torres","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"VRAIN\u2013Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Universitat Polit\u00e8cnica de Val\u00e8ncia, Cam\u00ed de Vera s\/n, 46022 Val\u00e8ncia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5115-8751","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Miguel","family":"Rebollo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"VRAIN\u2013Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Universitat Polit\u00e8cnica de Val\u00e8ncia, Cam\u00ed de Vera s\/n, 46022 Val\u00e8ncia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6209-9603","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Javier","family":"Palanca","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"VRAIN\u2013Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Universitat Polit\u00e8cnica de Val\u00e8ncia, Cam\u00ed de Vera s\/n, 46022 Val\u00e8ncia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8278-3947","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mario","family":"Aragon\u00e9s Lozano","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Communications Department, Universitat Polit\u00e8cnica de Val\u00e8ncia, Cam\u00ed de Vera s\/n, 46022 Val\u00e8ncia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"200495","article-title":"Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cybersecurity: Classification and Survey","volume":"26","author":"Finistrella","year":"2025","journal-title":"Intell. 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