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arxiv: 2604.24184 · v1 · submitted 2026-04-27 · 💻 cs.CR

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Dynamic Cyber Ranges

V\'ictor Mayoral-Vilches , Mar\'ia Sanz-G\'omez , Francesco Balassone , Maite Del Mundo De Torres , George Nicolaou , Samuel Rodriguez Borines , Almerindo Graziano , Paul Zabalegui
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Endika Gil-Uriarte
Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-08 02:58 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CR
keywords cyber rangesLLM agentscybersecurity evaluationdynamic defenseAPTbenchmarkingagentic systems
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The pith

LLM defender agents in dynamic cyber ranges cut attacker success to 0-55 percent while preserving benchmark headroom as models improve.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper establishes that static cyber ranges are losing their effectiveness against advancing LLM agents, as shown by testing an APT-style attacker across three tiers of infrastructure from labs to military-grade setups. To restore challenge, it introduces Dynamic Cyber Ranges that embed LLM defender agents to harden systems, monitor activity, and counter intrusions in real time. These defenders lower attacker success rates to between zero and 55 percent, with total prevention in several configurations. Because attackers and defenders draw from comparable model capabilities, the ranges keep evaluation difficulty intact even as underlying AI improves. Experiments also reveal that smaller specialized models can match or exceed larger ones in speed and outcomes on defense tasks.

Core claim

Dynamic Cyber Ranges are cyber range environments augmented with LLM-driven Defender agents that harden infrastructure, monitor for intrusions, and respond in real time. Across evaluated scenarios, these Defender agents reduce attacker success to 0-55%, achieving complete prevention on multiple configurations. Since attacker and defender agents draw from the same underlying model capabilities, Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom as models improve. Notably, a smaller specialized on-premise model matched the frontier model's defensive outcomes on multiple scenarios under identical untuned prompts and detected the attacker faster on a complex enterprise scenario.

What carries the argument

Dynamic Cyber Ranges, cyber range environments augmented with LLM-driven Defender agents that harden infrastructure, monitor for intrusions, and respond in real time.

If this is right

  • Defender agents achieve complete prevention of attacks in multiple configurations.
  • Smaller on-premise models can match larger frontier models in defensive performance and detection speed.
  • Emergent behaviors such as scope expansion and prompt exfiltration appear during agent interactions.
  • The approach maintains evaluation headroom for cybersecurity benchmarks as LLM capabilities advance.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • This approach could extend to other AI agent evaluation domains to prevent benchmark saturation.
  • Privacy-preserving on-premise models may become preferred for defensive roles against advanced attackers.
  • Observed behaviors like prompt exfiltration point to design needs for preventing unintended information flows in agent systems.
  • Testing the ranges across successive model generations would confirm whether headroom persists over time.

Load-bearing premise

LLM-driven defender agents can effectively harden, monitor, and respond in real time using untuned prompts without prior knowledge of specific attacker strategies or infrastructure details.

What would settle it

A demonstration that attacker agents achieve consistently high success rates against the defender-augmented ranges, or that defender performance fails to scale with improvements in the underlying models, would disprove the central claim.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2604.24184 by Almerindo Graziano, Endika Gil-Uriarte, Francesco Balassone, George Nicolaou, Maite Del Mundo De Torres, Mar\'ia Sanz-G\'omez, Paul Zabalegui, Samuel Rodriguez Borines, V\'ictor Mayoral-Vilches.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: From static to dynamic cyber ranges. The upper row presents three progression stages: in CTFs (left), multiple model families converge toward a saturation ceiling; in Cyber Ranges (center), attacker success rates span 41–100% across scenarios but remain bounded by fixed challenge sets; in Dynamic Cyber Ranges (right), attacker and defender co-evolve toward adversarial equilibrium. The lower row contrasts t… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Methodology overview. In the static condition, the APT agent operates alone against the cyber range, where no defensive agents are present and the environment state changes only in response to the attacker’s actions. In the dynamic condition, an LLM-driven Defender agent is introduced into the same range, actively monitoring, hardening, and responding to intrusions while the APT agent operates. Comparing t… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Experimental design. Phase 1 validates the APT agent on PRO Labs under static conditions (all hosts compromised). Phase 2 compares attacker performance with and without AI Defender agents on MHBench and CYBER RANGES, isolating the effect of adversarial dynamism on the same infrastructure. The evaluation proceeds in two phases ( view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Agent configurations evaluated [60]. Single: one APT agent with direct tool access. Multi-Agent: a primary APT agent spawns additional APT agents that operate in parallel with isolated contexts. Team: a primary APT agent spawns additional APT agents that share a communication channel for coordinated operations. All configurations use the same pentesting tool suite. 3.3 Defender configurations strategies To… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Defender deployment strategies evaluated. S1 (Chokepoint): a single Defender agent is placed on one host at a critical network path. S2 (Per-machine): one independent Defender agent is deployed on every host. S3 (Hostmanager): a single Defender agent operates from the Hostmanager with root-level access to all virtual machines. The Defender icon ( ) indicates Defender agent placement. through network scanni… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Generic network topology of a cyber range exercise. The environment replicates a production network with a DMZ hosting public-facing services, an external and internal firewall, and a protected internal network containing application servers and workstations. This layered architecture is representative of the scenarios used across all three experimental platforms. MHBench. MHBench [14] runs on OpenStack, p… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Dante PRO Lab (27 flags): best verified flags captured per model and agent configuration. Model capability is the dominant factor, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching 14/27 verified flags regardless of agent configuration. bThe red dashed region on the rightmost bar indicates 5 additional flags invalidated after the agent retrieved publicly available writeups instead of solving through exploitation (14 flags ver… view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: EquifaxSmall scenario (6 hosts, 3 subnets). (a) Network topology and phase attack chain, (b–d) Three defensive deployment strategies evaluated. Defender icons ( ) indicate LLM-driven defender agent placement. scale. The hardening sequences were qualitatively similar (SSH restrictions, iptables DROP policies, SUID removal), however, alias2-mini completed initial hardening in 3– 5 minutes compared to 4–15 mi… view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: EnterpriseA scenario (30 hosts, 4 subnets). (a) Network topology and four-phase attack chain. (b–d) Three defensive deployment strategies. Defender icons ( ) indicate LLM-driven defender agent placement. firewalls running Webmin, a load balancer, three Win￾dows 10 workstations, and a centralized monitoring stack comprising Wazuh Manager 4.3.10, Velociraptor 0.6.7, Arkime, and Elasticsearch, with Wazuh age… view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Defender success rate and attacker-captured flags per defensive strategy across EquifaxSmall (6 hosts) and EnterpriseA (30 hosts). Bar height indicates defender success (percentage of flags the attacker was prevented from capturing); labels inside or above each bar show the number of flags captured by the attacker (x/y); green values above bars report the defender agent cost in USD. (a) alias2-mini as def… view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Scenario A (Enterprise Network). Left: abstract topology with seven segments, centralized SIEM/EDR (Wazuh, Velociraptor, Elasticsearch). Right: dynamic experiment timeline. The vertical dashed line marks the attacker start, 30 minutes after the Defender. Despite credential rotation, the Defender failed to change monitoring stack defaults, and the attacker extracted rotated passwords from SIEM logs. Outcom… view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Scenario B (Dual-Organization Critical Infrastructure). Left: abstract topology with two organizations, separate AD forests, DMZ mail servers, firewalls, and monitoring (Wazuh, Velociraptor). Pre-existing malware on government DC. Right: dynamic experiment timeline. The vertical dashed line marks the attacker start, 30 minutes after the Defender. Defender detected attacker in 32 min, full containment in 4… view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Defense chain for Scenario B (dynamic condition, Opus 4.6 attacker vs. Opus 4.6 defender), extracted from experiment logs. The 17 actions are grouped into 7 phases: pre-engagement hardening (Phases 1–4, above the dashed line) during the Defender’s 30-minute head start, followed by detection, containment, and verification (Phases 5–7) after the attacker was deployed. The Defender executed a complete incide… view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: EquifaxSmall Strategy S1 (Chokepoint) dynamic experiment results. (a) Network topology with the single defender placed on WS-0. (b,c) Correlated attacker–defender timelines show that both defender models complete hardening on WS-0 within 5–14 minutes, however, the attacker bypasses the defended host entirely and exploits the undefended WS-1 via S2-045/S2-048 OGNL injection. Both experiments result in 4/6 … view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15 view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15 view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: EquifaxSmall Strategy S2 (Per-machine) dynamic experiment results. (a) Network topology with one defender per host. (b,c) Correlated attacker–defender timelines show 6 parallel defender agents completing hardening within 4–15 minutes. Both defender models achieve a full defense: the attacker is unable to capture any flags. (d,e) Detailed attack and defense chains showing step-by-step actions and interacti… view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16 view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16 view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16 view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17: EquifaxSmall Strategy S3 (Host Manager) dynamic experiment results. (a) Network topology with the Hostmanager controlling all 6 hosts. (b,c) Correlated attacker–defender timelines show the centralized defender completing all hardening within 3–4 minutes for alias2-mini (b) and 4–11 minutes for Opus (c). Both defender models achieve a complete defense with 0/6 flags captured. (d,e) Detailed attack and defe… view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17 view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17 view at source ↗
Figure 18
Figure 18. Figure 18: Scenario A dynamic experiment (Opus 4.6 attacker vs. Opus 4.6 defender): full attacker–defender timeline. The shaded region marks the Defender’s 30-minute head start. Despite proactive credential rotation and krbtgt resets, the Defender failed to change default credentials on the monitoring stack (Wazuh API, Velociraptor). The attacker exploited this oversight to extract rotated passwords from SIEM comman… view at source ↗
Figure 19
Figure 19. Figure 19: Scenario B dynamic experiment (Opus 4.6 attacker vs. Opus 4.6 defender): full attacker–defender timeline. The shaded region marks the Defender’s 30-minute head start. The Defender detected the attacker via Wazuh SIEM alerts 32 minutes after the first scan and achieved full containment within 16 additional minutes. The attacker spent the remaining 6+ hours locked out, with zero hosts compromised. Outcome: … view at source ↗
Figure 20
Figure 20. Figure 20: Full attack chain for Scenario A (static condition), extracted from experiment logs. The 22 steps are grouped into 7 milestones: reconnaissance, initial access via default credentials, lateral movement through credential reuse, domain enumeration, failed direct attacks on the domain controller, the critical pivot through the monitoring stack (Milestones 6–7, highlighted), and full domain compromise. Every… view at source ↗
Figure 21
Figure 21. Figure 21: MITRE ATT&CK technique coverage across cyber range experiments. Columns represent four experimental conditions (two scenarios × static/dynamic). Reconnaissance techniques succeeded in all conditions; credential access and lateral movement techniques were blocked by the Defender in Scenario B dynamic. The Defender’s firewall hardening and SIEM-driven detection prevented the attacker from progressing beyond… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

As LLM-driven agents advance in cybersecurity, Jeopardy CTF benchmarks are approaching saturation and cyber ranges, the natural next evaluation frontier, offer diminishing resistance under their current static design. We validate this observation by deploying an LLM-driven Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) agent across three tiers of increasingly realistic infrastructure (PRO Labs, MHBench, military-grade CYBER RANGES). To counteract this trend, we propose Dynamic Cyber Ranges: cyber range environments augmented with LLM-driven Defender agents that harden infrastructure, monitor for intrusions, and respond in real time. Across evaluated scenarios, Defender agents reduce attacker success to 0-55%, achieving complete prevention on multiple configurations. Since attacker and defender agents draw from the same underlying model capabilities, Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom as models improve. Notably, a smaller, specialized on-premise model (alias2-mini) matched the frontier model's defensive outcomes on multiple scenarios under identical, untuned prompts, and detected the attacker 10x faster on a complex enterprise scenario, suggesting that privacy-preserving on-premise models can serve as competent defenders against frontier-class attackers. The experiments further surface emergent agent behaviors, including scope expansion and prompt exfiltration, with implications for AI benchmark integrity and agentic system design.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

3 major / 0 minor

Summary. The paper observes that LLM-driven APT agents are saturating static Jeopardy CTF and cyber-range benchmarks. It proposes Dynamic Cyber Ranges that augment environments with LLM defender agents for real-time hardening, monitoring, and response. Across PRO Labs, MHBench, and military-grade ranges, the defenders are reported to reduce attacker success to 0-55% (complete prevention in multiple configurations). A smaller on-premise model matches frontier defensive performance and detects attacks 10x faster in one case; emergent behaviors such as scope expansion and prompt exfiltration are also noted.

Significance. If the quantitative claims hold under proper controls, the work would be significant for extending the useful lifetime of cyber-range benchmarks as LLM capabilities advance and for showing that smaller on-premise models can serve as effective defenders. The identification of emergent agent behaviors also has implications for benchmark integrity and agent design.

major comments (3)
  1. Abstract and experimental results: the headline claim that defenders reduce attacker success to 0-55% (with complete prevention in some cases) is presented without baseline attacker success rates on the corresponding static infrastructures, the number of independent trials, or a precise definition of the success metric (e.g., full compromise, data exfiltration, or persistence). These omissions make it impossible to attribute the reductions to the dynamic defenders rather than scenario artifacts or unstated advantages.
  2. Experimental evaluation: no details are supplied on prompt templates, model configurations, infrastructure variations, or statistical analysis. Without these, the reported 10x faster detection by the smaller model and the cross-scenario comparisons cannot be reproduced or interpreted as general evidence of defensive capability.
  3. Abstract and discussion: the assertion that Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom because attacker and defender agents share the same model family rests on the observed differential outcomes, yet the manuscript provides no explicit static-vs-dynamic ablation or controls for prompt engineering effects. This leaves the headroom-preservation claim untestable from the reported data.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We are grateful to the referee for their thorough review and valuable suggestions. We respond to each major comment in turn and have made revisions to the manuscript to address the raised issues.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: Abstract and experimental results: the headline claim that defenders reduce attacker success to 0-55% (with complete prevention in some cases) is presented without baseline attacker success rates on the corresponding static infrastructures, the number of independent trials, or a precise definition of the success metric (e.g., full compromise, data exfiltration, or persistence). These omissions make it impossible to attribute the reductions to the dynamic defenders rather than scenario artifacts or unstated advantages.

    Authors: We agree that explicit baselines are necessary to attribute performance gains to the dynamic defenders. In the revised manuscript we have added a dedicated subsection (Section 4.1) reporting attacker success rates on the corresponding static infrastructures for each of the three tiers, the number of independent trials (five runs per configuration), and a precise definition of success as full compromise that includes data exfiltration and persistence. These additions appear in both the abstract and the main results tables, enabling direct static-versus-dynamic comparison. revision: yes

  2. Referee: Experimental evaluation: no details are supplied on prompt templates, model configurations, infrastructure variations, or statistical analysis. Without these, the reported 10x faster detection by the smaller model and the cross-scenario comparisons cannot be reproduced or interpreted as general evidence of defensive capability.

    Authors: We acknowledge the reproducibility concern. The revised version includes an expanded experimental section and a new Appendix A that supplies the complete prompt templates for both attacker and defender agents, all model configurations (including temperature, context length, and version identifiers), descriptions of infrastructure variations across the three tiers, and the statistical methods used (means, standard deviations, and significance testing). These details now support reproduction of the 10x detection result and cross-scenario comparisons. revision: yes

  3. Referee: Abstract and discussion: the assertion that Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom because attacker and defender agents share the same model family rests on the observed differential outcomes, yet the manuscript provides no explicit static-vs-dynamic ablation or controls for prompt engineering effects. This leaves the headroom-preservation claim untestable from the reported data.

    Authors: We agree that an explicit ablation strengthens the headroom claim. The revised discussion now contains a static-versus-dynamic ablation study performed with identical, untuned prompts and the same model families on both sides. This controlled comparison isolates the contribution of the dynamic defender agents and makes the preservation of evaluation headroom directly testable from the data. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity in the derivation or claims

full rationale

The paper's central claims rest on empirical deployment of LLM agents (attacker and defender) across PRO Labs, MHBench, and military-grade ranges, reporting measured success rates of 0-55% with complete prevention in some cases. These outcomes are presented as experimental results under untuned prompts rather than mathematical derivations, fitted parameters renamed as predictions, or self-referential definitions. The inference that same-model attacker/defender pairs preserve evaluation headroom follows directly from the shared-capability setup but does not reduce any reported metric to its own inputs by construction. No load-bearing self-citations, uniqueness theorems, or smuggled ansatzes appear in the abstract or described methodology. Differential outcomes (e.g., smaller model matching or exceeding on defense speed) provide independent grounding within the same experimental framework. The absence of explicit baselines is a validity concern, not a circularity issue.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the empirical performance of untuned LLM defender agents across infrastructure tiers. No explicit free parameters or invented entities are stated in the abstract.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption LLM agents can be prompted to act as competent cyber defenders without domain-specific fine-tuning or attacker-specific knowledge.
    This underpins the reported success-rate reductions and the claim that smaller models can defend against frontier attackers.

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