Paper

{
  "raw_xml": "<entry>\n    <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22577v1</id>\n    <title>STRIATUM-CTF: A Protocol-Driven Agentic Framework for General-Purpose CTF Solving</title>\n    <updated>2026-03-23T21:17:26Z</updated>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22577v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22577v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n    <summary>Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in code generation, yet they struggle with the multi-step, stateful reasoning required for offensive cybersecurity operations. Existing research often relies on static benchmarks that fail to capture the dynamic nature of real-world vulnerabilities. In this work, we introduce STRIATUM-CTF (A Search-based Test-time Reasoning Inference Agent for Tactical Utility Maximization in Cybersecurity), a modular agentic framework built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP). By standardizing tool interfaces for system introspection, decompilation, and runtime debugging, STRIATUM-CTF enables the agent to maintain a coherent context window across extended exploit trajectories.\n  We validate this approach not merely on synthetic datasets, but in a live competitive environment. Our system participated in a university-hosted Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competition in late 2025, where it operated autonomously to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in real-time. STRIATUM-CTF secured First Place, outperforming 21 human teams and demonstrating strong adaptability in a dynamic problem-solving setting. We analyze the agent's decision-making logs to show how MCP-based tool abstraction significantly reduces hallucination compared to naive prompting strategies. These results suggest that standardized context protocols are a critical path toward robust autonomous cyber-reasoning systems.</summary>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CR'/>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.AI'/>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.MA'/>\n    <published>2026-03-23T21:17:26Z</published>\n    <arxiv:comment>8 pages, 7 pages</arxiv:comment>\n    <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CR'/>\n    <author>\n      <name>James Hugglestone</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Samuel Jacob Chacko</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Dawson Stoller</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ryan Schmidt</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Xiuwen Liu</name>\n    </author>\n  </entry>"
}