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

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Benlong, Chen, Guoqiang, Chen, Kejiang, Shang, Xiuwei, Han, Jiapeng, He, Yanru, Zhang, Weiming, Yu, Nenghai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929574459211776
author Wu, Benlong
Chen, Guoqiang
Chen, Kejiang
Shang, Xiuwei
Han, Jiapeng
He, Yanru
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
author_facet Wu, Benlong
Chen, Guoqiang
Chen, Kejiang
Shang, Xiuwei
Han, Jiapeng
He, Yanru
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
contents 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 models (LLMs) have made significant progress in various fields, and the development potential of LLM-based agents can revolutionize the cybersecurity penetration testing industry. In this work, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end penetration testing benchmark using a real-world penetration testing environment to explore the capabilities of LLM-based agents in this domain. Our results reveal that the agents are familiar with the framework of penetration testing tasks, but they still face limitations in generating accurate commands and executing complete processes. Accordingly, we summarize the current challenges, including the difficulty of maintaining the entire message history and the tendency for the agent to become stuck. Based on the above insights, we propose a Penetration testing State Machine (PSM) that utilizes the Finite State Machine (FSM) methodology to address these limitations. Then, we introduce AutoPT, an automated penetration testing agent based on the principle of PSM driven by LLMs, which utilizes the inherent inference ability of LLM and the constraint framework of state machines. Our evaluation results show that AutoPT outperforms the baseline framework ReAct on the GPT-4o mini model and improves the task completion rate from 22% to 41% on the benchmark target. Compared with the baseline framework and manual work, AutoPT also reduces time and economic costs further. Hence, our AutoPT has facilitated the development of automated penetration testing and significantly impacted both academia and industry.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_01236
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AutoPT: How Far Are We from the End2End Automated Web Penetration Testing?
Wu, Benlong
Chen, Guoqiang
Chen, Kejiang
Shang, Xiuwei
Han, Jiapeng
He, Yanru
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
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 models (LLMs) have made significant progress in various fields, and the development potential of LLM-based agents can revolutionize the cybersecurity penetration testing industry. In this work, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end penetration testing benchmark using a real-world penetration testing environment to explore the capabilities of LLM-based agents in this domain. Our results reveal that the agents are familiar with the framework of penetration testing tasks, but they still face limitations in generating accurate commands and executing complete processes. Accordingly, we summarize the current challenges, including the difficulty of maintaining the entire message history and the tendency for the agent to become stuck. Based on the above insights, we propose a Penetration testing State Machine (PSM) that utilizes the Finite State Machine (FSM) methodology to address these limitations. Then, we introduce AutoPT, an automated penetration testing agent based on the principle of PSM driven by LLMs, which utilizes the inherent inference ability of LLM and the constraint framework of state machines. Our evaluation results show that AutoPT outperforms the baseline framework ReAct on the GPT-4o mini model and improves the task completion rate from 22% to 41% on the benchmark target. Compared with the baseline framework and manual work, AutoPT also reduces time and economic costs further. Hence, our AutoPT has facilitated the development of automated penetration testing and significantly impacted both academia and industry.
title AutoPT: How Far Are We from the End2End Automated Web Penetration Testing?
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01236