Agentic AI for Cyber Resilience: A New Security Paradigm and Its System-Theoretic Foundations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Tao, Zhu, Quanyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Tao
Zhu, Quanyan
author_facet Li, Tao
Zhu, Quanyan
contents Cybersecurity is being fundamentally reshaped by foundation-model-based artificial intelligence. Large language models now enable autonomous planning, tool orchestration, and strategic adaptation at scale, challenging security architectures built on static rules, perimeter defenses, and human-centered workflows. This chapter argues for a shift from prevention-centric security toward agentic cyber resilience. Rather than seeking perfect protection, resilient systems must anticipate disruption, maintain critical functions under attack, recover efficiently, and learn continuously. We situate this shift within the historical evolution of cybersecurity paradigms, culminating in an AI-augmented paradigm where autonomous agents participate directly in sensing, reasoning, action, and adaptation across cyber and cyber-physical systems. We then develop a system-level framework for designing agentic AI workflows. A general agentic architecture is introduced, and attacker and defender workflows are analyzed as coupled adaptive processes, and game-theoretic formulations are shown to provide a unifying design language for autonomy allocation, information flow, and temporal composition. Case studies in automated penetration testing, remediation, and cyber deception illustrate how equilibrium-based design enables system-level resiliency design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agentic AI for Cyber Resilience: A New Security Paradigm and Its System-Theoretic Foundations
Li, Tao
Zhu, Quanyan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity is being fundamentally reshaped by foundation-model-based artificial intelligence. Large language models now enable autonomous planning, tool orchestration, and strategic adaptation at scale, challenging security architectures built on static rules, perimeter defenses, and human-centered workflows. This chapter argues for a shift from prevention-centric security toward agentic cyber resilience. Rather than seeking perfect protection, resilient systems must anticipate disruption, maintain critical functions under attack, recover efficiently, and learn continuously. We situate this shift within the historical evolution of cybersecurity paradigms, culminating in an AI-augmented paradigm where autonomous agents participate directly in sensing, reasoning, action, and adaptation across cyber and cyber-physical systems. We then develop a system-level framework for designing agentic AI workflows. A general agentic architecture is introduced, and attacker and defender workflows are analyzed as coupled adaptive processes, and game-theoretic formulations are shown to provide a unifying design language for autonomy allocation, information flow, and temporal composition. Case studies in automated penetration testing, remediation, and cyber deception illustrate how equilibrium-based design enables system-level resiliency design.
title Agentic AI for Cyber Resilience: A New Security Paradigm and Its System-Theoretic Foundations
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22883