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Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team (arxiv.org)
3 points by infwhispers 99 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They examined widely used AI tools that run hacking tasks and found shared flaws letting an attacker steal keys and take over the operator's computer, even from an isolated container. The paper maps the full attack path and proposes a safer design that blocks these routes.

Abstract

The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.

Dario Pasquini, Michal Bazyli, Taras Fedynyshyn, Artem Sorokin
arXiv:2606.24496 · cs.CR, cs.AI · submitted Jun 23, 2026 · updated Aug 17, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · v0.1

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