arXiv:2610.02869v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autonomous penetration testing agents conduct multi-step attacks by continuously adapting their plans and actions to target responses. As a common de...
By Yuelin Wang, Jiongchi Yu, Yanbang Sun
arXiv:2608. 02657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic LLMs are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, e.
By Jianshuo Dong, Yiming Liu, Maosen Zhang, Nan Deng, Xu Peng, Xiaoping Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Jie Zhang, Han Qiu
arXiv:2602. 01425v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour.
By Vikram Natarajan, Devina Jain, Shivam Arora, Satvik Golechha, Joseph Bloom
arXiv:2609.23894v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agentic AI extends LLM security beyond generated content to persistent state, autonomous actions, tool use, and interactions with humans and other ag...
By Heewon Baek, Alsharif Abuadbba, Kristen Moore, Hyoungshick Kim, Surya Nepal
arXiv:2607. 26998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents automate penetration testing through an observation-action loop, selecting actions based on observations returned by tools.
By Ruoyu Wang, Heng Zhao, Renjie Wu, Mengnan Zhao, Zhixuan Chu, Wanyu Lin, Tianhang Zheng
arXiv:2610.12445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent incidents have highlighted the challenge of monitoring LLM agents and the danger of models deceiving people. We show that white-box de...
By Oskar J. Hollinsworth, Alex F. Spies, Tigist Diriba, Adam Gleave, Chris Cundy
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. 02644v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic scaffolds have dramatically improved LLM performance on complex, long-horizon tasks, yielding both broad benefits and amplified risks in domains like cybersecurity.
By Eliot Krzysztof Jones, Mateusz Dziemian, Matt Fredrikson, J Zico Kolter
The paper presents a white‑box deception detection system that uses probes trained on the largest deception dataset (FIBS) and a novel architecture aggregating across layers and tokens. The probes achieve 98.8% AUC on SHADE‑Arena, outperforming a text‑monitoring baseline, and reach up to 99.7% AUC when detecting introspective deception that cannot be inferred from context alone. They also effectively detect deception in open‑weight models on politically sensitive topics and when models are pressured about their beliefs.
By Oskar J. Hollinsworth, Alex F. Spies, Tigist Diriba, Adam Gleave, Chris Cundy
arXiv:2606. 17478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern.
By Kexin Chen, Yi Liu, Haonan Zhang, Yanhui Li, Xinyu Deng, Dongxia Wang
arXiv:2608. 15012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created a growing asymmetry in cybersecurity, where attack accelerates toward autonomous execution while defense remains predominantly human-intensive.
By Yuhan Meng, Shaofei Li, Jionghao Huang, Jiandong Jin, Puyi Wang, Hanlin Jiang, Anis Yusof, Peng Jiang, Zhenkai Liang, Yao Guo, Ding Li
arXiv:2604. 08169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be induced by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization.
By Niklas Herbster, Martin Zborowski, Alberto Tosato, Gauthier Gidel, Tommaso Tosato