BlueSTAR: Tiered Agentic Architecture for Autonomous Cyber Defense
BlueSTAR is a tiered agentic LLM architecture for autonomous cyber defense, validated on live enterprise IT/OT cyber ranges against seven attack chains.
Researchers present BlueSTAR, a tiered agentic architecture for autonomous cyber defense in enterprise IT/OT networks that transforms high-volume security telemetry into compact indicators of compromise. It pairs deterministic containment for known threats with LLM reasoning for attacks requiring contextual and cross-cycle analysis, and introduces a resilience metric jointly weighing attacker reach, mission-critical impact, and defensive disruption. Evaluation on two live cyber ranges with seven attack chains based on real-world intrusion techniques covered credential theft, repeated compromise, concurrent attackers, and attacks on physical processes.
- Compresses high-volume telemetry into compact indicators of compromise.
- Retains fast deterministic containment for known threats.
- Handles credential theft, repeated compromise, and concurrent attackers.
- Introduces a resilience metric for autonomous defense evaluation.
- Tested on two live enterprise IT/OT cyber ranges.
Full article180 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Cyber attacks are increasingly automated, narrowing the time available for human analysts to detect, reason about, and respond to intrusions. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising foundation for autonomous cyber defense because they can correlate heterogeneous evidence and reason about previously unseen threats. However, directly applying LLMs to operational security telemetry is impractical: raw logs arrive faster than current models can process them, individual events are often ambiguous, and unconstrained LLM actions can introduce significant operational risk. We present BlueSTAR, a tiered agentic architecture for autonomous cyber defense in enterprise IT/OT networks. BlueSTAR first transforms high-volume security telemetry into compact indicators of compromise. We further introduce a resilience metric that jointly captures attacker reach, impact on mission-critical assets, and disruption caused by defensive actions. We evaluate BlueSTAR on two live enterprise IT/OT cyber ranges using seven attack chains based on real-world intrusion techniques. Across attack chains, BlueSTAR retains the fast containment of deterministic response for known threats while successfully defending against attacks requiring contextual and cross-cycle reasoning, including credential theft, repeated compromise, concurrent attackers, and attacks against physical processes.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11852