Enhancing Linux Privilege Escalation Attack Capabilities of Local LLM Agents
Cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform autonomous penetration-testing sub-tasks such as Linux privilege escalation, but raise security, privacy, and sovereignty concerns. Locally hosted open-weight models avoid these issues, yet prior work reports that small open-weight models succeed on only 8-16% of standardized privilege-escalation tasks, far below frontier cloud models. This paper is an empirical study of why small models fail at this task and which engineering techniques close the gap. From execution traces we distill six recurring failure modes, map each to an established enhancement technique, and evaluate five (chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval-augmented generati...
| Authors | Benjamin Probst, Andreas Happe, Jürgen Cito |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 August 2026 |
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