arXiv AI

Beyond Success Rate: Cost-Aware Evaluation of Offensive and Defensive Security Agents

arXiv:2607. 15263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Security-agent evaluations commonly measure peak offensive capability under generous inference budgets, emphasizing vulnerability discovery, exploit development, penetration testing, and CTF completion.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Decoupling Reconnaissance and Exploitation: Measuring the Capability Boundaries of LLM-Based Web Penetration Testing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated penetration testing, yet existing end-to-end black-box evaluations are highly susceptible to error cascading: failures in early reconnaissance can mask an agent's actual ability to exploit vulnerabilities. To more accurately characterize these capabilities, we propose a two-stage decoupled evaluation framework that separates exploit execution from reconnaissance.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

How Do LLM Agents Actually Get the Flag? Trace-Level Provenance for Agentic Offensive Security Evaluation

The paper introduces CTF-ABACUS, a trace-based auditing framework that reconstructs each autonomous language-model agent’s run in Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges into evidence‑grounded solve profiles. By decomposing actions into penetration‑testing phases and techniques, it distinguishes genuine exploitation from shortcut methods such as memorized recall or guessing. Applying the framework to 1,435 CTF attempts by six models on 240 challenges shows that only 62‑87% of recovered flags are trace‑verified, highlighting that many successes rely on shallow trajectories rather than true exploitation.

By Kimberly Milner, Minghao Shao, Nanda Rani, Haoran Xi, Venkata Sai Charan Putrevu, Meet Udeshi, Sandeep K. Shukla, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami, Muhammad Shafique, Ramesh Karri
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Closing the Sim-to-Real Gap: An Evaluation Framework for Autonomous Cyber Defense Configuration of Commercial EDR

arXiv:2606. 08168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leading commercial endpoint detection and response (EDR) products have shifted from operator-configured rule sets to multi-component systems where autonomous AI components operate alongside, and increasingly in place of, operator-deployed policies.

By Kerri Prinos, Lilianne Brush
arXiv AI
Jul 31

SecRespond: Benchmarking AI Agents for Real-World Post-Compromise Incident Response

arXiv:2607. 26791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly adopted in real-world security operations with access to host artifacts and command-line interfaces (CLIs), making it critical to thoroughly assess their security capabilities.

By Lehan Wang, Boli Chen, Ruixue Ding, Pengjun Xie, Jinwei Huang, Zhendong Liu, Shuo Wang, Tao Lei, Xin Ouyang, Xiaomeng Li
arXiv AI
Jun 2

AgentRedBench: Dynamic Redteaming and Integration-Aware Defense for LLM Agents over SaaS Integrations

arXiv:2606. 02240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection in tool-use agents is a concrete production threat: LLM agents read from integrations (third-party services such as Gmail, Salesforce, or Jira accessed through tool calls) whose response content the user neither writes nor controls.

By Hiskias Dingeto, Will Leeney
arXiv AI
Sep 12

BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructure

BenchShield is a formal, model-backed instrumentation layer designed to protect reward integrity in large language model (LLM) agent benchmarks. It uses a finite lifecycle model of reward-relevant events to run a static, phase-aware taint analysis that flags potential reward-hacking paths before execution, and a runtime analysis that attributes concrete agent actions and provides evidence-backed claims. The system was evaluated on a corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories from over 31,000 public agent runs across three benchmarks, showing significant improvements in recall, coverage, and cost efficiency compared to a baseline hackability scanner.

By Shenghan Zheng, Zonglin Di, Yimin Liu, Kyoung Whan Choe, Jiankai Sun, Heguang Lin, Penghao Jiang, Yifeng He, Xiao Cheng, Jicheng Wang, Wenbo Chen, Alex Yates, Yinzhe Zhao, Bingran You, Yuan Gao, Ayush Munot, Shubham Gaur, Zhe Ye, Hao Wang, Xiangyi Li, Dawn Song, Christophe Hauser