Staying on the Attack Path: Structured State for Long-Horizon Automated Penetration Testing
Large language model (LLM) based agents are increasingly applied to cybersecurity tasks such as vulnerability discovery and automated penetration testing. On long-horizon security tasks, however, such agents remain limited by context forgetting and intent drift: early critical facts and causal reasoning chains are lost over extended interactions, and the agent falls into aimless, repetitive exploration. This paper proposes Intentest, an intent-graph-guided automated penetration testing agent that externalizes long-horizon state from the LLM's context window onto a persistent fact-intent directed acyclic graph (DAG), thereby substantially reducing invalid transitions. We evaluate Intentest...
| Authors | Weizhe Wang, Yitong Zhang, Yao Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 7 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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