Systematic Capability Benchmarking of Frontier Large Language Models for Offensive Cyber Tasks
We present, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive cross-model evaluation of LLM agents on offensive cybersecurity tasks, benchmarking 10 frontier models from 7 providers on all 200 challenges of the NYU CTF Bench. Building on the D-CIPHER multi-agent framework, we extend it with multi-provider backend support, a custom Kali Linux environment with over 100 pre-installed penetration testing tools, and runtime tool-discovery agents. Through a controlled factorial study, we find that the Kali Linux environment yields a +9.5 percentage-point improvement over Ubuntu, while auto-prompting and category-specific tips often degrade performance in well-equipped environments. Among models, Claude ...
| Authors | Tyler H. Merves, Michael H. Conaway, Joseph M. Escobar et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 18 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 April 2026 |
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