Enhanced Interactive Generative Model Agent for CTF Challenges

Talor Abramovich¹, Meet Udeshi², Minghao Shao², Kilian Lieret³, Haoran Xi², Kimberly Milner², Sofija Jancheska², John Yang⁴, Carlos E. Jimenez³, Farshad Khorrami², Prashanth Krishnamurthy², Brendan Dolan-Gavitt², Muhammad Shafique⁵, Karthik Narasimhan³, Ramesh Karri², and Ofir Press³

Although language model (LM) agents are demonstrating growing potential in many domains, their success in cybersecurity has been limited due to simplistic design and the lack of fundamental features for this domain. We present EnIGMA, an LM agent for autonomously solving Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges. EnIGMA introduces new Agent-Computer Interfaces (ACIs) to improve the success rate on CTF challenges. We establish the novel Interactive Agent Tools concept, which enables LM agents to run interactive command-line utilities essential for these challenges. Empirical analysis of EnIGMA on over 350 CTF challenges from three different benchmarks indicates that providing a robust set of new tools with demonstration of their usage helps the LM solve complex problems and achieves state-of-the-art results on the NYU CTF and Intercode-CTF benchmarks, managing to solve more than three times more challenges of NYU CTF benchmark compared to previous best agent (the NYU CTF agent).

Want to try it yourself and explore our new agent? We are completely open-source! You can try it out in the SWE-agent repository, read our documentation and explore more about the research work in our paper.

Results

Benchmark	Model	% Solved
NYU CTF	EnIGMA w/ Claude 3.5 Sonnet	13.5
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4 Turbo (1106)	7.0
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4o	9.0
	NYU CTF agent w/ GPT-4 Turbo	4.0
InterCode-CTF	EnIGMA w/ Claude 3.5 Sonnet	67.0
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4 Turbo (1106)	72.0
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4o	69.0
	InterCode-CTF Agent	40.0
	Google DeepMind Agent w/ Gemini Ultra	24.0
HackTheBox	EnIGMA w/ Claude 3.5 Sonnet	26.0
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4 Turbo (1106)	18.0
	EnIGMA w/ GPT-4o	16.0
	NYU CTF agent w/ GPT-4 Turbo	20.0

How it Works

Interactive Agent Tools In Action

BibTeX

Will be uploaded soon

1. Tel-Aviv University ↩︎

2. New York University ↩︎ ↩︎² ↩︎³ ↩︎⁴ ↩︎⁵ ↩︎⁶ ↩︎⁷ ↩︎⁸ ↩︎⁹

3. Princeton Language and Intelligence, Princeton University ↩︎ ↩︎² ↩︎³ ↩︎⁴

4. Stanford University ↩︎

5. New York University Abu Dhabi ↩︎