The unprecedented increase of complex cyber threats has significantly
exposed the limits of classical approaches to penetration testing-often
manual, time-consuming activities relying on human expertise. It
is challenging for conventional approaches to scale appropriately, dynamically
adapt to shifting attack vectors, and comprehensively cover
increasingly complex systems. In turn, the ability of organizations to
apply countermeasures that target the ever-increasing scale and sophistication
of current cyber threats is being significantly stretched.
With the development of Artifcial Intelligence and large language
models, this opens up very promising possibilities towards solving
some of these issues; existing frameworks have nonetheless remained
subject to several severe problems, such as insufficient context conservation,
inefficient use in multi-step reasoning, inappropriateness for
scaling dynamics, and highly important ethical implications because
of its deployment and further misuse.
This thesis proposes the AutoSecAgent, an advanced framework in
automated penetration testing. By embedding advanced capabilities
such as recursive memory embedding for long-term context maintenance
across multi-step tasks, Retrieval-Augmented Generation in
real time, and a modular architecture that can ensure adaptability and
scalability, the current system will be overcome. The framework also
interacts flawlessly with industrial standard tools like Metasploit and
PowerShell, dynamically interacting with other systems to perform
complex tasks in penetration testing. AutoSecAgent further improves
through reinforcement learning and adaptive feedback mechanisms,
refining its decision-making processes toward more optimal execution
of tasks over time while minimizing computational overhead.
Key issues include reasoning over extended attack chains, adapting
to diversified and evolving environments, and further improving scalability
are addressed by AutoSecAgent which marks a major leap
toward fully automated penetration testing with an innovative design
that ensures increased task completion rates, improved efficiency,
and real-time performance while building a framework for the ethical
and responsible application of AI-based solutions in penetration
testing. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of AutoSecAgent
in performance compared to existing models-include PentestGPT
and AutoAttacker in various axes of efficiency, adaptability,
and task successes, while setting new benchmarks for scalability and
long-term contextual reasoning. The research underlines how such an
AI-powered framework can be fundamentally disruptive to modern
cybersecurity as a reliable and future-proof way to help organizations
build an effective defense against increasing attacks and protect digital
infrastructure.