ARACNE: An LLM-Based Autonomous Shell Pentesting Agent

We introduce ARACNE, a fully autonomous LLM-based pentesting agent tailored for SSH services that can execute commands on real Linux shell systems. Introduces a new agent architecture with multi-LLM model support. Experiments show that ARACNE can reach a 60\% success rate against the autonomous defender ShelLM and a 57.58\% success rate against the Over The Wire Bandit CTF challenges, improving over the state-of-the-art. When winning, the average number of actions taken by the agent to accomplish the goals was less than 5. The results show that the use of multi-LLM is a promising approach to increase accuracy in the actions.

@article{nieponice2025_2502.18528,
  title={ ARACNE: An LLM-Based Autonomous Shell Pentesting Agent },
  author={ Tomas Nieponice and Veronica Valeros and Sebastian Garcia },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18528},
  year={ 2025 }
}