arXiv AI

Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent Ransomware Detection and Family Attribution under Analysis Budgets

The paper introduces a cost‑aware Hierarchical Multi‑Agent System (HMAS) for ransomware detection and family attribution that prioritizes static analysis and escalates to dynamic and memory analysis only when necessary, thereby reducing analysis time and resource usage. In experiments on 12,439 samples from 16 ransomware families, the deterministic HMAS achieved high F1 scores (0.93) while resolving nearly 58% of cases with static evidence alone and cutting average internal analysis cost by 44.6% compared to exhaustive methods. The system also records a complete provenance trace for each decision and includes optional local LLM review for limited verdict adjustment.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent Ransomware Detection and Family Attribution

The paper introduces a Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent System (HMAS) for ransomware detection and family attribution that adaptively selects analysis modalities to balance accuracy and computational cost. Static analysis is used first, with dynamic and memory modalities added only when confidence is low or specialist agents disagree, guided by a cost model. Experiments show HMAS achieves high accuracy (96.57% binary detection, 0.90 macro‑F1 attribution) while reducing analysis cost by 43.97% and latency, with 56.05% of cases resolved using static evidence alone.

By Mubashar Iqbal, Asifullah Khan
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 Computer Vision
Sep 22

Dissecting Agentic Forensics: The Role of Triage, Prompting, and Evidence Arbitration in Open-World Fake Image Detection

The paper investigates an agentic framework for open‑world fake image detection that combines specialist detectors with per‑detector triage, prompting, and conflict‑aware evidence arbitration. Experiments across six configurations and three multimodal large language model backbones reveal that naive detector fusion yields high false‑positive rates, while triage and prompting consistently filter unreliable evidence. The most significant improvement comes from the reasoning component: a stronger judge markedly outperforms a weaker one, especially under distribution shift, and overall manipulation recall is nearly saturated, highlighting that the key challenge lies in calibrating trust and arbitrating conflicting forensic evidence rather than detecting manipulations themselves.

By Xianlong Li (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy), Pietro Bongini (University of Siena, Italy), Niccol\'o Pancino (University of Siena, Italy), Marco Blanchini (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy), Benedetta Tondi (University of Siena, Italy), Mauro Barni (University of Siena, Italy)
arXiv AI
Aug 24

ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents

ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).

By Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng, Chang Jin, An Wang, Xiaokun Luan, Zhixiao Lin, Jingjing Qu, Xia Hu, Xingcheng Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Early Detection of Distributed Backdoors in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: A Characterization Study

arXiv:2607. 24893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems can be attacked by a payload that no single agent ever holds in full: a poisoned tool hides encrypted fragments in its observations, spreads them across several agents, and an external step reassembles and executes them after the run.

By Diego Fernandez Arias, Dev Prashant Mistry, Ren Wang, Yibo Hu
arXiv AI
Jul 8

StepShield: When, Not Whether to Intervene on Rogue Agents

arXiv:2601. 22136v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent safety benchmarks measure whether a monitor detects harm, not when.

By Gloria Felicia (University of Virginia), Zitha Sasindran (Indian Institute of Science Bangalore), Jinfeng He (Cornell University), Michael Eniolade (University of the Cumberlands), Hemant Kumar (University of Arizona), Milan Hussain Angati (California State University Northridge)
arXiv AI
Aug 13

The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmark

arXiv:2608. 11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are rapidly improving in cybersecurity capabilities when the source code is available for analysis, yet much of the software most consequential to cybersecurity, including malware, firmware, and proprietary applications, is available only as binaries.

By Jeremy Spence, Nicholas Assaderaghi, Jinhao Zhu, Nikil Ravi, Raluca Ada Popa, Guannan Wei, Yangruibo Ding, Zhuo Zhang