paper-with-me

Papers

APT-Agent: Automated Penetration Testing using Large Language Models

2026-05-24 · William Guanting Li, Alsharif Abuadbba, Kristen Moore, Dan Dongseong Kim arxiv

Penetration testing is essential to securing modern web infrastructures, yet traditional manual methods struggle to keep pace with their scale and complexity. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automating these tasks, but existing approaches face two persistent challenges: hallucination of technical entities and insufficient long-term contextual memory. To address these issues, we present APT-Agent, a fully automated LLM-driven penetration testing framework that systematically orchestrates reconnaissance, exploitation, and exfiltration. APT-Agent introduces a hybrid rectification module to recover hallucinated commands and a command-specific memory architecture to preserve operational context across multi-step attack sequences. We evaluate our APT-Agent on Metasploitable 2 against seven vulnerable services spanning web, database, and network protocols. APT-Agent achieves an 84.29% end-to-end exploitation success rate, compared to 48.57% (Script Kiddie) and 18.57% (PentestGPT) under matched conditions. By reducing cognitive burden and minimizing reliance on human intervention, APT-Agent represents a step toward scalable, reliable, and cognitively efficient automation for penetration testing.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2605.24949

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

AutoPT: How Far Are We from the End2End Automated Web Penetration Testing?

2024-11-02 · Benlong Wu, Guoqiang Chen, Kejiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang 외

Penetration testing is essential to ensure Web security, which can detect and fix vulnerabilities in advance, and prevent data leakage and serious consequences. The powerful inference capabilities of large language model…

Guided Reasoning in LLM-Driven Penetration Testing Using Structured Attack Trees

2025-09-09 · Katsuaki Nakano, Reza Fayyazi, Shanchieh Jay Yang, Michael Zuzak arxiv

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven interest in automating cybersecurity penetration testing workflows, offering the promise of faster and more consistent vulnerability assessment for enterprise s…

xOffense: An Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework for Penetration Testing with Domain-Adapted Large Language Models

2025-09-16 · Phung Duc Luong, Le Tran Gia Bao, Nguyen Vu Khai Tam, Dong Huu Nguyen Khoa 외 arxiv

This work introduces xOffense, an AI-driven, multi-agent penetration testing framework that shifts the process from labor-intensive, expert-driven manual efforts to fully automated, machine-executable workflows capable o…

Deep hierarchical reinforcement agents for automated penetration testing

2021-09-14 · Khuong Tran, Ashlesha Akella, Maxwell Standen, Junae Kim 외

Penetration testing the organised attack of a computer system in order to test existing defences has been used extensively to evaluate network security. This is a time consuming process and requires in-depth knowledge fo…

Deep Reinforcement LearningQ-Learning

Towards Automated Penetration Testing: Introducing LLM Benchmark, Analysis, and Improvements

2024-10-22 · Isamu Isozaki, Manil Shrestha, Rick Console, Edward Kim

Hacking poses a significant threat to cybersecurity, inflicting billions of dollars in damages annually. To mitigate these risks, ethical hacking, or penetration testing, is employed to identify vulnerabilities in system…