AutoPenBench: Benchmarking Generative Agents for Penetration Testing

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gioacchini, Luca, Mellia, Marco, Drago, Idilio, Delsanto, Alexander, Siracusano, Giuseppe, Bifulco, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Gioacchini, Luca
Mellia, Marco
Drago, Idilio
Delsanto, Alexander
Siracusano, Giuseppe
Bifulco, Roberto
author_facet Gioacchini, Luca
Mellia, Marco
Drago, Idilio
Delsanto, Alexander
Siracusano, Giuseppe
Bifulco, Roberto
contents Generative AI agents, software systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are emerging as a promising approach to automate cybersecurity tasks. Among the others, penetration testing is a challenging field due to the task complexity and the diverse strategies to simulate cyber-attacks. Despite growing interest and initial studies in automating penetration testing with generative agents, there remains a significant gap in the form of a comprehensive and standard framework for their evaluation and development. This paper introduces AutoPenBench, an open benchmark for evaluating generative agents in automated penetration testing. We present a comprehensive framework that includes 33 tasks, each representing a vulnerable system that the agent has to attack. Tasks are of increasing difficulty levels, including in-vitro and real-world scenarios. We assess the agent performance with generic and specific milestones that allow us to compare results in a standardised manner and understand the limits of the agent under test. We show the benefits of AutoPenBench by testing two agent architectures: a fully autonomous and a semi-autonomous supporting human interaction. We compare their performance and limitations. For example, the fully autonomous agent performs unsatisfactorily achieving a 21% Success Rate (SR) across the benchmark, solving 27% of the simple tasks and only one real-world task. In contrast, the assisted agent demonstrates substantial improvements, with 64% of SR. AutoPenBench allows us also to observe how different LLMs like GPT-4o or OpenAI o1 impact the ability of the agents to complete the tasks. We believe that our benchmark fills the gap with a standard and flexible framework to compare penetration testing agents on a common ground. We hope to extend AutoPenBench along with the research community by making it available under https://github.com/lucagioacchini/auto-pen-bench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_03225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AutoPenBench: Benchmarking Generative Agents for Penetration Testing
Gioacchini, Luca
Mellia, Marco
Drago, Idilio
Delsanto, Alexander
Siracusano, Giuseppe
Bifulco, Roberto
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI agents, software systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are emerging as a promising approach to automate cybersecurity tasks. Among the others, penetration testing is a challenging field due to the task complexity and the diverse strategies to simulate cyber-attacks. Despite growing interest and initial studies in automating penetration testing with generative agents, there remains a significant gap in the form of a comprehensive and standard framework for their evaluation and development. This paper introduces AutoPenBench, an open benchmark for evaluating generative agents in automated penetration testing. We present a comprehensive framework that includes 33 tasks, each representing a vulnerable system that the agent has to attack. Tasks are of increasing difficulty levels, including in-vitro and real-world scenarios. We assess the agent performance with generic and specific milestones that allow us to compare results in a standardised manner and understand the limits of the agent under test. We show the benefits of AutoPenBench by testing two agent architectures: a fully autonomous and a semi-autonomous supporting human interaction. We compare their performance and limitations. For example, the fully autonomous agent performs unsatisfactorily achieving a 21% Success Rate (SR) across the benchmark, solving 27% of the simple tasks and only one real-world task. In contrast, the assisted agent demonstrates substantial improvements, with 64% of SR. AutoPenBench allows us also to observe how different LLMs like GPT-4o or OpenAI o1 impact the ability of the agents to complete the tasks. We believe that our benchmark fills the gap with a standard and flexible framework to compare penetration testing agents on a common ground. We hope to extend AutoPenBench along with the research community by making it available under https://github.com/lucagioacchini/auto-pen-bench.
title AutoPenBench: Benchmarking Generative Agents for Penetration Testing
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03225