Dynamic Risk Assessments for Offensive Cybersecurity Agents
Authors: name: Boyi Wei; name: Benedikt Stroebl; name: Jiacen Xu; name: Joie Zhang; name: Zhou Li; name: Peter Henderson
Published: 2025-05-23 21:18:59

Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly becoming better autonomous programmers,
raising the prospect that they could also automate dangerous offensive
cyber-operations. Current frontier model audits probe the cybersecurity risks
of such agents, but most fail to account for the degrees of freedom available
to adversaries in the real world. In particular, with strong verifiers and
financial incentives, agents for offensive cybersecurity are amenable to
iterative improvement by would-be adversaries. We argue that assessments should
take into account an expanded threat model in the context of cybersecurity,
emphasizing the varying degrees of freedom that an adversary may possess in
stateful and non-stateful environments within a fixed compute budget. We show
that even with a relatively small compute budget (8 H100 GPU Hours in our
study), adversaries can improve an agent's cybersecurity capability on
InterCode CTF by more than 40\% relative to the baseline -- without any
external assistance. These results highlight the need to evaluate agents'
cybersecurity risk in a dynamic manner, painting a more representative picture
of risk.