Autonomous LLM Agents & CTFs: A Second Look
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed to automate offensive security tasks, with recent studies reporting near human-level success rates in Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges. We here revisit these results, providing a second look at these claims. We engineer different agent architectures of increasing complexity and modularity on 30 web-based CTFs challenges spanning 14 vulnerability classes. We instantiate these agents with multiple LLM backbones, and compare them with claude-code, a general-purpose agent that automatically determines its internal architecture. Our evaluation yields three main findings. First, claude-code achieves performance comparable to the engin...
| Authors | Youness Bouchari, Matteo Boffa, Marco Mellia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 April 2026 |
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