LLMs as Hackers: Autonomous Linux Privilege Escalation Attacks

Abstract Penetration-testing is crucial for identifying and mitigating system vulnerabilities, with privilege-escalation being a critical subtask involving gaining elevated access to protected resources. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new avenues for automating these security practices by emulating human behavior. However, a comprehensive understanding of LLMs’ efficacy and limitations in performing autonomous Linux privilege-escalation attacks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce hackingBuddyGPT , a fully automated LLM-driven prototype designed for evaluating autonomous Linux privilege-escalation. We curated a novel, publicly available Linux privilege-escalation…

• TU
  Technische Universität Wien