Toward Secure AI-Powered Penetration Testing Agents: Security Threats, Guardrails, and Architectural Perspectives
Paper proposes a threat taxonomy and guardrail analysis for LLM-powered autonomous penetration testing agents, covering lifecycle, architecture, and behavioral attacks.
The paper analyzes security threats to autonomous LLM-based penetration testing agents that independently perform reconnaissance, vulnerability identification, exploitation planning, and post-exploitation with minimal human supervision. It characterizes trust boundaries and attack surfaces of representative agent architectures and proposes a threat taxonomy spanning LLM lifecycle attacks, agent-architecture attacks, and cross-cutting behavioral attacks. The authors argue existing conversational-AI guardrails are insufficient for agentic, long-horizon offensive workflows and outline research directions for context-aware, architecture-aware guardrails.
- Threat taxonomy covers LLM lifecycle, agent-architecture, and cross-cutting behavioral attacks
- Characterizes trust boundaries and attack surfaces of representative autonomous pentesting agent architectures
- Existing conversational AI guardrails deemed insufficient for agentic offensive security workflows
- Identifies research gaps for specialized, context-aware, architecture-aware guardrails
Full article173 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
LLM-powered autonomous agents are transforming the penetration testing space with dynamic, multi-step offensive security workflows that require minimal supervision by humans. These agents leverage sophisticated reasoning abilities and external security tools to independently carry out reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities, devise exploitation plans, and perform post-exploitation operations. But the ability to have persistent memory, to take actions in the real world, and to do long-horizon reasoning raises qualitatively different security concerns than traditional chat-based LLM systems. Existing guardrail mechanisms for conversational AI may not be sufficient to secure autonomous AI pentesting agents accordingly. To address these issues, we carry out a comprehensive security analysis on autonomous AI-penetration testing agents. We systematically analyse representative agent architectures, characterise their trust boundaries and attack surfaces and propose a threat taxonomy that is aligned with the lifecycle and covers LLM lifecycle attacks, agent-architecture attacks and cross-cutting behavioural attacks. We analyse the limitations of existing guardrail mechanisms, identify key research gaps, and discuss future research directions for developing specialised, context-aware, and architecture-aware guardrails to secure next-generation AI-driven offensive security systems.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16694