Sohrob Kazerounian

Strahinja Janjusevic, Anna Baron Garcia, Sohrob Kazerounian

Generative AI is reshaping offensive cybersecurity by enabling autonomous red team agents that can plan, execute, and adapt during penetration tests. However, existing approaches face trade-offs between generality and specialization, and practical deployments reveal challenges such as hallucinations, context limitations, and ethical concerns. In this work, we introduce a novel command & control (C2) architecture leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to coordinate distributed, adaptive reconnaissance agents covertly across networks. Notably, we find that our architecture not only improves goal-directed behavior of the system as whole, but also eliminates key host and network artifacts that can be used to detect and prevent command & control behavior altogether. We begin with a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art generative red teaming methods, from fine-tuned specialist models to modular or agentic frameworks, analyzing their automation capabilities against task-specific accuracy. We then detail how our MCP-based C2 can overcome current limitations by enabling asynchronous, parallel operations and real-time intelligence sharing without periodic beaconing. We furthermore explore advanced adversarial capabilities of this architecture, its detection-evasion techniques, and address dual-use ethical implications, proposing defensive measures and controlled evaluation in lab settings. Experimental comparisons with traditional C2 show drastic reductions in manual effort and detection footprint. We conclude with future directions for integrating autonomous exploitation, defensive LLM agents, predictive evasive maneuvers, and multi-agent swarms. The proposed MCP-enabled C2 framework demonstrates a significant step toward realistic, AI-driven red team operations that can simulate advanced persistent threats while informing the development of next-generation defensive systems.

Tuomas P. Oikarinen, Daniel C. Hannah, Sohrob Kazerounian

The recent introduction of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and their growing popularity in the past few years has enabled the application of deep learning algorithms to non-Euclidean, graph-structured data. GNNs have achieved state-of-the-art results across an impressive array of graph-based machine learning problems. Nevertheless, despite their rapid pace of development, much of the work on GNNs has focused on graph classification and embedding techniques, largely ignoring regression tasks over graph data. In this paper, we develop a Graph Mixture Density Network (GraphMDN), which combines graph neural networks with mixture density network (MDN) outputs. By combining these techniques, GraphMDNs have the advantage of naturally being able to incorporate graph structured information into a neural architecture, as well as the ability to model multi-modal regression targets. As such, GraphMDNs are designed to excel on regression tasks wherein the data are graph structured, and target statistics are better represented by mixtures of densities rather than singular values (so-called ``inverse problems"). To demonstrate this, we extend an existing GNN architecture known as Semantic GCN (SemGCN) to a GraphMDN structure, and show results from the Human3.6M pose estimation task. The extended model consistently outperforms both GCN and MDN architectures on their own, with a comparable number of parameters.

Sohrob Kazerounian, Matthew Luciw, Mathis Richter et al.

We introduce a dynamic neural algorithm called Dynamic Neural (DN) SARSA(λ) for learning a behavioral sequence from delayed reward. DN-SARSA(λ) combines Dynamic Field Theory models of behavioral sequence representation, classical reinforcement learning, and a computational neuroscience model of working memory, called Item and Order working memory, which serves as an eligibility trace. DN-SARSA(λ) is implemented on both a simulated and real robot that must learn a specific rewarding sequence of elementary behaviors from exploration. Results show DN-SARSA(λ) performs on the level of the discrete SARSA(λ), validating the feasibility of general reinforcement learning without compromising neural dynamics.