Where Cyber Agents Struggle: Bottleneck Analysis of Multi-Stage LLM Agents

The paper presents a diagnostic study of a multi‑stage LLM‑based cyber agent system, examining its orchestrator, executor, and validator components in enterprise‑style lateral‑movement scenarios. Six advanced LLMs were tested across expert‑defined, self‑scaffolded, and fully autonomous modes, with metrics that include validator consistency, evidence grounding, token usage, retries, and runtime. Findings show that while validators are generally relevant, they are often nonspecific and overly optimistic, and the main bottlenecks lie in credential acquisition and lateral‑movement tasks, especially under full autonomy.

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• llms
• agents