Cybersecurity AI: A Game-Theoretic AI for Guiding Attack and Defense

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Mayoral-Vilches, Víctor, Sanz-Gómez, María, Balassone, Francesco, Rass, Stefan, Salas-Espejo, Lidia, Jablonski, Benjamin, Navarrete-Lozano, Luis Javier, de Torres, Maite del Mundo, Chavez, Cristóbal R. J. Veas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Mayoral-Vilches, Víctor
Sanz-Gómez, María
Balassone, Francesco
Rass, Stefan
Salas-Espejo, Lidia
Jablonski, Benjamin
Navarrete-Lozano, Luis Javier
de Torres, Maite del Mundo
Chavez, Cristóbal R. J. Veas
author_facet Mayoral-Vilches, Víctor
Sanz-Gómez, María
Balassone, Francesco
Rass, Stefan
Salas-Espejo, Lidia
Jablonski, Benjamin
Navarrete-Lozano, Luis Javier
de Torres, Maite del Mundo
Chavez, Cristóbal R. J. Veas
contents AI-driven penetration testing now executes thousands of actions per hour but still lacks the strategic intuition humans apply in competitive security. To build cybersecurity superintelligence --Cybersecurity AI exceeding best human capability-such strategic intuition must be embedded into agentic reasoning processes. We present Generative Cut-the-Rope (G-CTR), a game-theoretic guidance layer that extracts attack graphs from agent's context, computes Nash equilibria with effort-aware scoring, and feeds a concise digest back into the LLM loop \emph{guiding} the agent's actions. Across five real-world exercises, G-CTR matches 70--90% of expert graph structure while running 60--245x faster and over 140x cheaper than manual analysis. In a 44-run cyber-range, adding the digest lifts success from 20.0% to 42.9%, cuts cost-per-success by 2.7x, and reduces behavioral variance by 5.2x. In Attack-and-Defense exercises, a shared digest produces the Purple agent, winning roughly 2:1 over the LLM-only baseline and 3.7:1 over independently guided teams. This closed-loop guidance is what produces the breakthrough: it reduces ambiguity, collapses the LLM's search space, suppresses hallucinations, and keeps the model anchored to the most relevant parts of the problem, yielding large gains in success rate, consistency, and reliability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_05887
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cybersecurity AI: A Game-Theoretic AI for Guiding Attack and Defense
Mayoral-Vilches, Víctor
Sanz-Gómez, María
Balassone, Francesco
Rass, Stefan
Salas-Espejo, Lidia
Jablonski, Benjamin
Navarrete-Lozano, Luis Javier
de Torres, Maite del Mundo
Chavez, Cristóbal R. J. Veas
Cryptography and Security
AI-driven penetration testing now executes thousands of actions per hour but still lacks the strategic intuition humans apply in competitive security. To build cybersecurity superintelligence --Cybersecurity AI exceeding best human capability-such strategic intuition must be embedded into agentic reasoning processes. We present Generative Cut-the-Rope (G-CTR), a game-theoretic guidance layer that extracts attack graphs from agent's context, computes Nash equilibria with effort-aware scoring, and feeds a concise digest back into the LLM loop \emph{guiding} the agent's actions. Across five real-world exercises, G-CTR matches 70--90% of expert graph structure while running 60--245x faster and over 140x cheaper than manual analysis. In a 44-run cyber-range, adding the digest lifts success from 20.0% to 42.9%, cuts cost-per-success by 2.7x, and reduces behavioral variance by 5.2x. In Attack-and-Defense exercises, a shared digest produces the Purple agent, winning roughly 2:1 over the LLM-only baseline and 3.7:1 over independently guided teams. This closed-loop guidance is what produces the breakthrough: it reduces ambiguity, collapses the LLM's search space, suppresses hallucinations, and keeps the model anchored to the most relevant parts of the problem, yielding large gains in success rate, consistency, and reliability.
title Cybersecurity AI: A Game-Theoretic AI for Guiding Attack and Defense
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05887