PrivEscalate: Measuring and Augmenting the Threat of LLM-Automated Linux Privilege Escalation
Researchers release PrivEscalate, a 531-scenario benchmark showing LLM agents' Linux privilege-escalation success varies by vulnerability class, plus PrivEscAgent, a domain-specialized agent that boosts success.
The paper introduces PrivEscalate, an open-source benchmark of 531 Dockerized Linux privilege-escalation scenarios spanning 14 sub-categories, plus 329 parameterized variants measuring sensitivity to environmental distractors. Evaluating six LLMs across three agent architectures shows capability is heterogeneous across vulnerability classes, sensitive to perturbation, and architecture-dependent. The authors also present PrivEscAgent, a wrapper adding deterministic enumeration, category matching, and step planning that outperforms prior privesc-agent baselines without modifying the underlying LLM. The benchmark is released to support LLM agent evaluation, defensive tool validation, and red-team training.
- 531 Dockerized scenarios across 14 privilege-escalation sub-categories, with 329 distractor variants
- Six LLMs and three agent architectures evaluated; no single model dominates high-prevalence classes
- Configuration rotation disrupts some agent exploit attempts but does not eliminate measured risk
- PrivEscAgent wrapper improves over prior privesc-agent baselines without LLM modifications
- Open-sourced for agent evaluation, defensive tool validation, and red-team training
Full article223 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly automate offensive operations across the cyber kill chain, their efficacy in complex local post-exploitation tasks remains inadequately quantified. Among these, Linux privilege escalation is a key step between initial access and full system compromise. However, existing evaluations for this task are limited by small sample sizes (fewer than 15 scenarios), lacking the scale to compare model capabilities under executable verification. To address this, we present PrivEscalate, a large-scale benchmark for Linux privilege escalation, comprising 531 Dockerized scenarios spanning 14 sub-categories. We additionally derive 329 parameterized variants to measure sensitivity to environmental distractors. Evaluating six LLMs across three agent architectures reveals: (i) model capability is heterogeneous across vulnerability classes, with no single model dominating across the high-prevalence classes, motivating multi-dimensional risk assessments; (ii) LLM successes are sensitive to environmental perturbation, so configuration rotation can disrupt some exploit attempts but does not eliminate the measured risk; and (iii) agent architectures can materially change success rates and reorder model rankings, though the magnitude is model-dependent. Leveraging these insights, we develop PrivEscAgent, a domain-specialized wrapper that augments a generic ReAct agent with deterministic enumeration, category matching, and step planning. PrivEscAgent improves over prior Linux privilege-escalation agent baselines without underlying LLM modifications. We release PrivEscalate as an open-source, Dockerized measurement instrument supporting LLM agent evaluation, defensive tool validation, and red-team training.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09087