2026· Journal of Cyber Security· 0 citations· 34 references
TL;DR
The proposed Large Language Model-Assisted Threat-Driven Testing System enables security teams, particularly resource-constrained organizations lacking dedicated red-team capabilities, to conduct high-fidelity threat simulation exercises aligned with current adversarial TTPs, without specialized AI expertise, thereby strengthening organizational cyber-readiness at significantly lower cost than traditional security testing approaches.
Abstract
: The rapid evolution of adversarial cyber threats demands proactive, scalable security testing methodologies capable of producing realistic, organization-specific attack scenarios. Conventional approaches, including manual red-teaming, scripted Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) platforms, and tabletop exercises, are constrained by high expert dependency, limited scenario variability, and an inability to dynamically adapt to an organization’s unique threat profile. This paper proposes and evaluates a Large Language Model (LLM)-Assisted Threat-Driven Testing System that integrates the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (MITRE ATT&CK) framework v14, a structured knowledge base of adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), with GPT-based language models accessed through the OpenAI API, to automate the generation of contextually tailored cyber-attack narratives. The system employs a service-oriented architecture implemented in Python, utilizing Streamlit for the interactive web interface, Pandas for ATT&CK data management, and LangChain as the prompt-orchestration middleware. Evaluation encompassed structured feedback surveys from 30 cybersecurity professionals representing security operations, red-teaming, and incident response roles, together with quantitative analysis using three performance metrics: ATT&CK Technique Coverage (ATC = 85%), False Positive Rate (FPR = 3.2%), and False Negative Rate (FNR = 11%). These results confirm that the system achieves high scenario fidelity, strong ATT&CK alignment, and a generation latency of 2–8 s per scenario. Practically, the framework enables security teams, particularly resource-constrained organizations lacking dedicated red-team capabilities, to conduct high-fidelity threat simulation exercises aligned with current adversarial TTPs, without specialized AI expertise, thereby strengthening organizational cyber-readiness at significantly lower cost than traditional security testing approaches.
The democratization of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) through Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a paradigm shift in organizational security posture, enabling non-expert users to access and interpret complex threat data through intuitive natural language interfaces. However, this democratization introduces a critical paradox: the very mechanisms that lower the barrier to CTI consumption simultaneously expand the attack surface for adversarial manipulation. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation into the dual challenge of CTI democratization and adversarial resilience, proposing a novel Multi-Layer Adversarial Defense Framework (MLADF) and the CTI-SHIELD (Systematic Hardening and Intelligence-Enhanced LLM Defense) algorithm. Our threat model—formalized through the STRIDE methodology—identifies four primary adversarial attack classes: prompt injection, data poisoning, output manipulation, and model extraction, and systematically analyses their exploitation pathways in CTI deployment contexts. We introduce the Adversarial Resistance Score (ARS), a composite metric for evaluating the robustness of CTI LLM interfaces, and a Confidence-Aware Response Sanitization (CARS) technique combining Monte Carlo dropout uncertainty quantification with knowledgebase factgrounding. Experimental evaluation through structured red-team exercises demonstrates that MLADF reduces adversarial attack success rates by an average of 87.3% compared to unprotected baselines while maintaining 91.4% user comprehension accuracy and achieving calibration error (ECE) of 0.028—superior to all competing methods. A human-in-the-loop user study (n=48) confirms that our protected interface reduces adversarial susceptibility by 76.0% (p<0.001) without degrading usability. Ablation studies confirm all four MLADF layers are individually necessary, and cross-domain generalization experiments across five security verticals confirm AUC > 0.90 outside the CTI training domain.
Manas Kumar Yogi, K. C. Bheri· International Journal of Adv...· 0 citations
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) enables Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to understand adversary behavior,
prioritize risks, and respond to cyber threats. However, cur-rent CTI workflows still depend heavily on manual analysis
of unstructured threat reports, vulnerability advisories, open-source intelligence, social media posts, and structured feeds. This
creates operational latency, inconsistent extraction quality, weak provenance, and limited scalability. This paper presents Auto
Threat AI, an agentic and explainable framework for automated CTI extraction, correlation, scoring, and analyst-governed SOC
operationalization. The proposed framework integrates determin-istic indicator extraction, Natural Language Processing (NLP),
schema-guided Large Language Model (LLM) agents, graph-aware threat correlation, bounded risk scoring, evidence-first
explainability, and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) governance. The system ingests heterogeneous CTI sources, extracts entities and
relations such as IOCs, CVEs, malware, campaigns, threat actors, tools, and techniques, constructs a threat knowledge graph,
gen-erates campaign candidates, and presents risk-ranked intelligence through a SOC dashboard. Experimental evaluation on
safe demonstration CTI data shows that the implemented prototype ingested 6 sources, extracted 36 entities, generated 33
relations, detected 11 threat events, identified 5 campaign candidates, and routed 8 items for HITL review. The results
demonstrate that Auto Threat AI can reduce manual CTI processing effort while improving traceability, explainability, and
analyst trust.
Methari Keeravani· International Journal for Re...· 0 citations
Threat modeling is essential for secure software development, yet manual analysis of cloud-native architectures is slow and demands scarce security expertise. We present ThreatForest, a multi-agent system that generates structured attack trees from source code repositories, maps attack steps to adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) from a pluggable set of frameworks (MITRE ATT&CK, CAPEC, and cloud-specific threat matrices), and synthesizes actionable mitigations. ThreatForest decomposes threat modeling into a multi-stage agent pipeline -- repository analysis, context refinement, threat generation, parallel attack-tree construction with TTP mapping and mitigation synthesis, and report generation -- orchestrated as a directed graph with deterministic verification gates, bounded retries, and three human-in-the-loop validation points. A domain-specific sentence-transformer maps each attack step to candidate techniques by cosine similarity; we show empirically that this embedding stage, not the surrounding pipeline, is the dominant accuracy bottleneck. We evaluate ThreatForest across seven application domains on a sixteen-dimension rubric, scored by a panel of independent LLM raters with an adversarial verification pass and expert review. Panel-measured quality reaches 0.63-0.68 (on a 0-1 scale) for threat statements, attack trees, and mitigations, but only 0.29 for embedding-only TTP mapping -- a gap stable across all seven domains that isolates the binding constraint. A controlled single-call baseline on the same model more than doubles mapping defensibility, pinning the limitation on the embedding encoder rather than the multi-agent design. To our knowledge, ThreatForest is the first end-to-end system that turns a code repository into TTP-mapped attack trees with evidence-based mitigations across adversary frameworks, with a reusable framework for benchmarking such systems.
C. Leo, Anton Dykyi, Danny Cortegaca et al.· 0 citations
A four-layer taxonomy mapping 13 vulnerability types across perception, brain, action, and interaction layers is contributed, and seven open problems centered on containment are identified.
Md Jafrin Hossain, Mohammad Arif Hossain, Nirwan Ansari· 0 citations
The growing complexity and frequency of cyberattacks make cybersecurity risk assessment an increasingly demanding task for organisations, requiring substantial expertise, resources, and adherence to established standards. This work explores the applicability of Large Language Model (LLM) to cybersecurity risk assessment, with a focus on threat identification and risk scoring. The paper presents a standalone consistency analysis across five models, measuring accuracy and stability under lexical, structural, and noisy prompt perturbations using an OWASP-oriented rubric. Building on the analysis results, we present a modular LLM-based system that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation, MITRE ATT&CK-Aligned threat evaluation, rubric-constrained risk scoring, and a Judge Reviewer, orchestrated through a Beliefs–Desires–Intentions control loop. The validation against incidents from the VERIS and EuRepoC datasets highlights limitations and weaknesses, and allows identifying the architectural and structural mitigations that can reduce prompt sensitivity in LLM-based risk assessment.
Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software. Generally available agents can already aid attackers, who only need to find one exploitable weakness, while defenders must continuously identify and patch all vulnerabilities across fast-growing codebases. Stronger defensive agents would help close this gap, yet the scarcity of security training data with reproducible build and execution environments remains a bottleneck. We present CyberForge, a framework that synthesizes executable, repository-level security training data by injecting vulnerabilities into real C/C++ projects. It validates each instance dynamically: the injected build must pass the project's unit tests, and generated proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) must trigger on the injected build and not on the clean one. CyberForge is not limited by the availability of disclosed vulnerabilities, therefore it can scale in comparison to data augmentation techniques which rely on historic CVE data. The resulting corpus holds 1034 validated vulnerabilities across 80 projects and 63 weakness categories, with edit locality similar to real CVE patches under a real-versus-real noise floor. Fine-tuning on trajectories collected over this corpus improves SEC-bench patch repair by +3.3 to +14.7 points, in all six configurations of three model scales and two teachers, with the 31B student reaching its GPT-5.4-mini teacher, 72.7% against 74.0%. These gains generalize out of distribution to PatchEval, a corpus containing other programming languages, where every configuration also improves and the 31B student passes its teacher.
Amine Lbath, Manan Suri, A. Delaitre et al.· 0 citations