Cochise: A Reference Harness for Autonomous Penetration Testing
Recent work on LLM-driven autonomous penetration testing reports promising results, but existing systems often bundle architectural, prompting, and tool-integration choices together. This makes it difficult to determine what is gained over a simple agent and harness. We present Cochise, a 630 LOC Python reference implementation for autonomous penetration-testing experiments. Cochise connects to a Linux execution host over SSH and supports attacking controlled target environments reachable from that jump host. The prototype implements a Planner--Executor architecture in which long-term state is maintained by the planner, while a ReAct-style executor issues commands over SSH and self-correc...
| Authors | Andreas Happe, Jürgen Cito |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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