arXiv:2607. 26314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stealth, the discipline of achieving an objective without revealing your presence, capabilities, or collected intelligence, is what separates sophisticated operators from detectable ones.
By Ads Dawson, Adrian Wood
arXiv:2606. 14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation.
By Fengyu Liu, Jiarun Dai, Yihe Fan, Wuyuao Mai, Ziao Li, Bofei Chen, Jie Zhang, Zheng Lou, Bocheng Xiang, Qiyi Zhang, Xudong Pan, Geng Hong, Yuan Zhang, Min Yang
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.
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: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:2606. 17930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI evaluations are shifting toward harder tasks that benefit from longer trajectories involving tool use and iterative problem solving.
By Jessica McFadyen, Ole Jorgensen, Harry Coppock, Kevin Wei, Cozmin Ududec
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:2607. 13085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent autonomous penetration testing papers report high benchmark scores while adding multi-component security harnesses around frontier LLMs.
By Ananda Dhakal, Krish Neupane, Aarjan Chaudhary
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:2607. 07474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic red-teaming benchmarks report whether an injected agent was compromised as a single bit: the attack succeeded, or it did not.
By Harry Owiredu-Ashley
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
arXiv:2608. 09476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cowork agents may complete benign tasks while disclosing protected data, manipulating unauthorized state, invocate unauthorized API.
By Hongwei Yao, Yiming Liu, Meihui Chen, Jieling Chen, Zikun Chen, Yiling He, Wangze Ni, Cong Wang, Kui Ren