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PentestChain is a ten‑phase automated penetration testing framework that uses a cost‑aware AI cascade, starting with a local 7B‑parameter Ollama model (qwen2.5‑7b) and then free‑tier OpenRouter and Cerebras models, with a rule‑based fallback. It exposes the entire pipeline through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that includes eleven tools. The authors evaluate the framework using standard testbeds (AutoPenBench, Cybench subset, PentestGPT 182‑sub‑task benchmark) and report that the local model keeps paid‑API cost at zero while detecting 26 services and enriching 34 CVEs on legacy targets.
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.
arXiv:2605. 23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source).
arXiv:2609.22664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on large language model agents for penetration testing is evaluated almost entirely by capability: whether the agent captures a flag or repr...
arXiv:2608.21423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic security uses large-language-model (LLM) agents to plan, dispatch, and interpret security tools. As these systems move from demonstrations to...
arXiv:2605. 10834v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI pentesting agents are increasingly credible as offensive security systems, but current benchmarks still provide limited guidance on which will perform best in real-world targets.