Dynamic Risk Assessment for Offensive Cybersecurity Agents

Boyi Wei^1,* ,  Benedikt Stroebl^1,* ,  Jiacen Xu² ,  Joie Zhang¹ ,  Zhou Li² ,  Peter Henderson^1  
*Equal Contribution
¹Princeton University    ²University of California, Irvine

Paper | Blogpost | Twitter 

Installation

Use the following command to clone the repo and the dataset:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:boyiwei/Dynamic-Risk-Assessment.git

Run the following command to install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note: We follow the same pipeline from S1 for self-training. Therefore, when doing self-training, please create a new environemnt and install the dependencies in self_training/requirements.txt:

pip install -r self_training/requirements.txt

Quick Start

Initialize Agents

Run the following command to initialize the agents, which will build the docker image.

bash setup.sh

Evaluation Workflow

The overall workflow is as follows:

1. Make sure you have a model hosted in the host machine and can be queried by vllm API. See https://github.com/benediktstroebl/della-inference for more details.
2. Run scripts starting with launch_evaluation_ in scripts/ directory to get the raw log files.
3. Run analysis/grade_benchmark.py to get pass@k score and confidence interval.

Repeated Sampling and Increasing Max Rounds of Interactions

We provide a script for running repeated sampling and increasing max rounds of interactions.

bash scripts/launch_evaluation_base.sh

Key arguments:

1. N: the max rounds of interactions ($N$ in our paper). We set it to 20 by default.
2. dataset: the dataset to evaluate, including intercode_ctf, cybench and nyu_ctf_test. We set it to intercode_ctf by default.
3. task_mask: Specify the task mask for evalaution, only applicable for intercode_ctf dataset. We set it to analysis/test_tasks.txt by default, which means we only evaluate on the test set. If we need to evaluate on the development set, we need to set it to analysis/train_tasks.txt.
4. model_name: the name of the model to evaluate, we set it to Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct by default.
5. parallelism: the number of parallel processes to run. We set it to 10 by default.
6. i: the repetition id. By setting i ranging fron 1 to 12, we repeat our experiments for 12 times.

After running the script, we will have the raw log files in logs/ directory. By running

python analysis/grade_benchmark.py --task_name $benchmark --N $N --output_file "acc_repeated_sampling.csv" --k0 12

We can get pass@k score (k=1-12) and confidence interval in acc_repeated_sampling.csv file. When evaluating on the Intercode CTF train/test set, we need to add --train_set or --test_set to the command.

Iterative Prompt Refinement

We provide a script for running iterative workflow refinement.

bash scripts/launch_evaluation_iter_prompt_refinement.sh

Key arguments:

1. k0: the number of rollouts. We set it to 12 by default.
2. iter_prompt_round: the number of iterative prompt refinement rounds. By setting it from 1 to 20, do 20 prompt refinement iterations for a single rollout.

Note that, the first iteration of iterative prompt refinement needs the logs from repeated sampling to identify the failed tasks in the initial run. Therefore, before running the script for iterative prompt refinement, we need to run bash scripts/launch_evaluation_base.sh first.

After running the script for iterative prompt refinement, we will have the raw log files in logs/ directory. By running

python analysis/grade_benchmark.py --iter_prompt --k0 $k0 --test_set --output_file "iter_prompt_refinement.csv"

We can get pass@k score (k=1-20) and confidence interval in acc_iter_prompt_refinement.csv file. The key difference here is we need to add --iter_prompt to the command.

Self-Training

Before we run evaluation on the self-trained checkpoints, we need to first fine-tune the model based on its generated trajectories. By running:

sbatch scripts/launch_self_training.slurm

We can get the self-trained checkpoints.

Key arguments:

1. epochs: the number of epochs to train. We set it to 5 by default.
2. lr: the learning rate. We set it to 1e-5 by default.
3. batch_size: the batch size. We set it to 16 by default.
4. weight_decay: the weight decay. We set it to 1e-4 by default.
5. train_dataset_name: the name of the train dataset. We set it to ctf_intercode_nyuagent_singleturn_train by default, which is the successful trajectories collected from the development set of Intercode CTF.
6. output_dir: the output directory to save the self-trained checkpoints.

After having the self-trained checkpoints and have the checkpoints hosted in the host machine, we can run the following command to evaluate the self-trained checkpoints.

bash scripts/launch_evaluation_ft.sh

Key arguments:

1. model_name: the name of the model to evaluate. This is dependent on the model name in the host machine, by default we use Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct-ft for self-trained model.
2. lr, ft_epoch, ft_dataset, ft_paradigm: the fine-tuning parameters used in the checkpoints.
3. N: the max rounds of interactions. We set it to 20 by default.
4. dataset: the dataset to evaluate. We set it to intercode_ctf by default.

Similarly, after having the raw log files, we can run

python analysis/grade_benchmark.py --task_name $benchmark --N $N --model_name Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct-ft_ft_intercode_nyuagent_singleturn_train_${ft_epoch}_lr_1e-5_fullparam --output_file "self_training.csv" --test_set --k0 12

to get the pass@k score and confidence interval in self_training.csv file. Here ft_epoch is the number of epochs used in the self-training.

Iterative Workflow Refinement

Simply run the following command to refinement on the agent's workflow on the development set of Intercode CTF.

bash launch_search_base_iter_workflow_refinement.sh

Key arguments:

1. iteration: the number of iterative workflow refinement rounds. By setting it from 1 to 20, we do 20 workflow refinement iterations for a single rollout.

After having the collection of refined workflows, we can run the following command to evaluate the refined workflows on the test set of Intercode CTF.

bash launch_evaluation_base_iter_workflow_refinement.sh

python grade_benchmark.py --model_name "Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct_adas${iteration}" --task_name $benchmark --N $N --output_file "acc_repeated_sampling_newnew.csv" --test_set --k0 5

Key arguments:

1. iteration: the iteration id needed to be evaluated. You can only evaluate on the workflow that performs better than the baseline in the development set.

Citing

If you find our work useful, please cite our work 😊

@misc{wei2025dynamicriskassessmentsoffensive,
      title={Dynamic Risk Assessments for Offensive Cybersecurity Agents}, 
      author={Boyi Wei and Benedikt Stroebl and Jiacen Xu and Joie Zhang and Zhou Li and Peter Henderson},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2505.18384},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CR},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18384}, 
}