PenForge: On-the-Fly Expert Agent Construction for Automated Penetration Testing
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Penetration testing is essential for identifying vulnerabilities in web applications before real adversaries can exploit them. Recent work has explored automating this process with Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, but existing approaches either rely on a single generic agent that struggles in complex scenarios or narrowly specialized agents that cannot adapt to diverse vulnerability types. We therefore introduce PenForge, a framework that dynamically constructs expert agents during testing rather than relying on those prepared beforehand. By integrating automated reconnaissance of potential attack surfaces with agents instantiated on the fly for context-aware exploitation, PenForge achieves a 20% exploit success rate (8/40) on CVE-Bench in the particularly challenging zero-day setting, which is a 2.7$\times$ improvement over the state-of-the-art. Our analysis also identifies three opportunities for future work: (1) supplying richer tool-usage knowledge to improve exploitation effectiveness; (2) extending benchmarks to include more vulnerabilities and attack types; and (3) fostering developer trust by incorporating explainable mechanisms and human review. As an emerging result with substantial potential impact, PenForge embodies the early-stage yet paradigm-shifting idea of on-the-fly agent construction, marking its promise as a step toward scalable and effective LLM-driven penetration testing.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Wed 15 AprDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
14:00 - 15:30 | Dependability and Security 2Research Track / Journal-first Papers / New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) at Oceania X Chair(s): Saeid Tizpaz-Niari University of Illinois Chicago | ||
14:00 15mTalk | TraceCaps: Inline Provenance and Risk Enforcement for Agentic Software Engineering New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Andre Catarino Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Claudia Mamede Carnegie Mellon University, Rui Melo Carnegie Mellon University & FEUP, Rui Maranhao Abreu University of Lisbon | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Can LLMs Hack Enterprise Networks? Autonomous Assumed Breach Penetration-Testing Active Directory Networks Journal-first Papers | ||
14:30 15mTalk | PenForge: On-the-Fly Expert Agent Construction for Automated Penetration Testing New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Huihui Huang Singapore Management University, Singapore, Jieke Shi Singapore Management University, Junkai Chen Singapore Management University, Singapore, Ting Zhang Monash University, Yikun Li Singapore Management University, Chengran Yang Singapore Management University, Singapore, Eng Lieh Ouh Singapore Management University, Singapore, Lwin Khin Shar Singapore Management University, David Lo Singapore Management University | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Security Attack Detectors Generated by LLMs Journal-first Papers Samuele Pasini Università della Svizzera italiana, Jinhan Kim Università della Svizzera italiana, Tommaso Aiello SAP Security Research, Rocio Cabrera Lozoya SAP Security Research, Antonino Sabetta SAP, Paolo Tonella USI Lugano | ||
15:00 15mTalk | LLM4JMH: Studying the Use of LLMs for Generating Java Performance Microbenchmarks Research Track Zongxiong Chen Fraunhofer FOKUS, Derui Zhu Technical University of Munich, Kundi Yao Ontario Tech University, Weiyi Shang University of Waterloo, Jinfu Chen Wuhan University, Jiahui Geng Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Alexander Pretschner TU Munich, Jens Grossklags Technical University of Munich, Manfred Hauswirth Fraunhofer FOKUS, Sonja Schimmler Fraunhofer FOKUS & TU Berlin | ||
15:15 15mTalk | RulePilot: An LLM-Powered Agent for Security Rule Generation Research Track Hongtai Wang National University of Singapore, Ming Xu Shanghai Jiao Tong University / National University of Singapore, Yanpei Guo National University of Singapore, Weili Han Fudan University, Hoon Wei Lim Cyber Special Ops-R&D, NCS Group, Jin Song Dong National University of Singapore | ||