LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the vulnerability and toy capture-the-flag problems. However, these agents still perform poorly on real-world vulnerabilities that are unknown to the agent ahead of time (zero-day vulnerabilities).In this work, we show that teams of LLM agents can exploit real-world, zero-day vulnerabilities. Prior agents struggle with exploring many different vulnerabilities and long-range planning when used alone. To resolve this, we introduce HPTSA, a system of agents with a planning agent that can launch subagents. The planning agent explores the system and determines which subagents to call, resolving long-term planning issues when trying different vulnerabilities. We construct a benchmark of 14 real-world vulnerabilities and show that our team of agents improve over prior agent frameworks by up to 4.3×.

As large language models (LLMs) have increased in their capabilities, so doestheir potential for dual use. To reduce harmful outputs, produces and vendors ofLLMs have used reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). In tandem,LLM vendors have been increasingly enabling fine-tuning of their most powerfulmodels. However, concurrent work has shown that fine-tuning can remove RLHFprotections. We may expect that the most powerful models currently available(GPT-4) are less susceptible to fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show the contrary: fine-tuning allows attackers to remove RLHFprotections with as few as 340 examples and a 95% success rate. These trainingexamples can be automatically generated with weaker models. We further show thatremoving RLHF protections does not decrease usefulness on non-censored outputs,providing evidence that our fine-tuning strategy does not decrease usefulnessdespite using weaker models to generate training data. Our results show the needfor further research on protections on LLMs.