mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

StealthBench: Measuring Operational Stealth in Autonomous Offensive-Security Agents

arXiv 2607.26314 ↗First posted 28 Jul 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Stealth, the discipline of achieving an objective without revealing your presence, capabilities, or collected intelligence, is what separates sophisticated operators from detectable ones. Elite security researchers and advanced persistent threats achieve their objectives unnoticed; autonomous agents increasingly inherit the same offensive tasks, but do they inherit the tradecraft? We introduce StealthBench,a benchmark that measures operational stealth in autonomous offensive-security agents across six operational security (OPSEC) dimensions. We extract 11 hand-verified OPSEC incidents from real bug-bounty and red-team trajectories, expanded into 14 dockerized task scenarios, where agents, despite finding real vulnerabilities, committed stealth failures inconsistent with standard operational tradecraft: embedding credentials in public uploads, deleting production resources to prove access, force-adding uninvolved users to demonstrate a race condition. We evaluate agent trajectories using a 3-model large language model (LLM) judge panel with majority-vote aggregation, measuring safe success rate (solved and stealthy), Stealth@Solve (tradecraft quality among successful solves), and reckless solve rate (solved but cover blown). Our results show that no model exceeds 54% safe success rate (the compound metric requiring both task completion and stealth), confirming that OPSEC failures are systematic across model families. We release StealthBench as a public benchmark to support both the development of stealth-aware agents and automated OPSEC monitoring for autonomous offensive-security deployments. The interactive leaderboard, evaluation harness, and dataset are available at https://stealthbench.com.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.

Builds on

22 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ScopeJudge: Cost-Aware Pre-Execution Gating for Offensive Security Agents8 Jul
  2. 2026ExploitBench: A Capability Ladder Benchmark for LLM Cybersecurity Agents13 May
  3. 2026Ghost in the Agent: Redefining Information Flow Tracking for LLM Agents25 Apr
  4. 2026How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM Agent Skills: An Empirical Study3 Apr
  5. 2026Agent-Sentry: Bounding LLM Agents via Execution Provenance24 Mar
  6. 2026AgentRaft: Automated Detection of Data Over-Exposure in LLM Agents8 Mar
  7. 2026AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems12 Feb
  8. 2026Co-RedTeam: Orchestrated Security Discovery and Exploitation with LLM Agents2 Feb
  9. 2026ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback15 Jan
  10. 2025PentestJudge: Judging Agent Behavior Against Operational Requirements4 Aug
  11. 2025ARACNE: An LLM-Based Autonomous Shell Pentesting Agent24 Feb
  12. 2024HackSynth: LLM Agent and Evaluation Framework for Autonomous Penetration Testing2 Dec
1 more
  1. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents18 Jan

Other references · 9

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  4. 2023AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversioncited by 229
  5. 2022Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Modelscited by 225
  6. 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 164
  7. 2025Securing AI Agents with Information-Flow Controlcited by 121
  8. 2025CASE-Bench: Context-Aware SafEty Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 20
  9. 2026Reachability Across the NL/PL Boundary: A Taxonomy-Driven Dataflow Model for LLM-Integrated Applicationscited by 1

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Not cited yet.

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  3. 2026Beyond Success Rate: Cost-Aware Evaluation of Offensive and Defensive Security Agents
  4. 2026SeClaw: Spec-Driven Security Task Synthesis for Evaluating Autonomous Agents
  5. 2025Dynamic Risk Assessments for Offensive Cybersecurity Agents
  6. 2026Measuring Safety Alignment Effects in Autonomous Security Agents
  7. 2026ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents
  8. 2026AgentTrust: Runtime Safety Evaluation and Interception for AI Agent Tool Use