Francesco Blefari

Matteo Lupinacci, Francesco Blefari, Francesco Romeo et al.

The growing and evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats necessitates the development of supporting tools and platforms that allow for the creation of realistic IT environments operating within virtual, controlled settings as Cyber Ranges (CRs). CRs can be exploited for analyzing vulnerabilities and experimenting with the effectiveness of devised countermeasures, as well as serving as training environments for building cyber security skills and abilities for IT operators. This paper proposes ARCeR as an innovative solution for the automatic generation and deployment of CRs, starting from user-provided descriptions in a natural language. ARCeR relies on the Agentic RAG paradigm, which allows it to fully exploit state-of-art AI technologies. Experimental results show that ARCeR is able to successfully process prompts even in cases that LLMs or basic RAG systems are not able to cope with. Furthermore, ARCeR is able to target any CR framework provided that specific knowledge is made available to it.

Matteo Lupinacci, Francesco Aurelio Pironti, Francesco Blefari et al.

The rapid adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) agents and multi-agent systems enables remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and generation. However, these systems introduce security vulnerabilities that extend beyond traditional content generation to system-level compromises. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the LLMs security used as reasoning engines within autonomous agents, highlighting how they can be exploited as attack vectors capable of achieving computer takeovers. We focus on how different attack surfaces and trust boundaries can be leveraged to orchestrate such takeovers. We demonstrate that adversaries can effectively coerce popular LLMs into autonomously installing and executing malware on victim machines. Our evaluation of 18 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals an alarming scenario: 94.4% of models succumb to Direct Prompt Injection, and 83.3% are vulnerable to the more stealthy and evasive RAG Backdoor Attack. Notably, we tested trust boundaries within multi-agent systems, where LLM agents interact and influence each other, and we revealed that LLMs which successfully resist direct injection or RAG backdoor attacks will execute identical payloads when requested by peer agents. We found that 100.0% of tested LLMs can be compromised through Inter-Agent Trust Exploitation attacks, and that every model exhibits context-dependent security behaviors that create exploitable blind spots.

Francesco Blefari, Cristian Cosentino, Francesco Aurelio Pironti et al.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) in large enterprises can generate hundreds of thousands of alerts per hour, overwhelming analysts with logs requiring rapidly evolving expertise. Conventional machine-learning detectors reduce alert volume but still yield many false positives, while standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines often retrieve irrelevant context and fail to justify predictions. We present CyberRAG, a modular agent-based RAG framework that delivers real-time classification, explanation, and structured reporting for cyber-attacks. A central LLM agent orchestrates: (i) fine-tuned classifiers specialized by attack family; (ii) tool adapters for enrichment and alerting; and (iii) an iterative retrieval-and-reason loop that queries a domain-specific knowledge base until evidence is relevant and self-consistent. Unlike traditional RAG, CyberRAG adopts an agentic design that enables dynamic control flow and adaptive reasoning. This architecture autonomously refines threat labels and natural-language justifications, reducing false positives and enhancing interpretability. It is also extensible: new attack types can be supported by adding classifiers without retraining the core agent. CyberRAG was evaluated on SQL Injection, XSS, and SSTI, achieving over 94\% accuracy per class and a final classification accuracy of 94.92\% through semantic orchestration. Generated explanations reached 0.94 in BERTScore and 4.9/5 in GPT-4-based expert evaluation, with robustness preserved against adversarial and unseen payloads. These results show that agentic, specialist-oriented RAG can combine high detection accuracy with trustworthy, SOC-ready prose, offering a flexible path toward partially automated cyber-defense workflows.

Francesco Romeo, Luigi Arena, Francesco Blefari et al.

Policy as Code (PaC) is a paradigm that encodes security and compliance policies into machine-readable formats, enabling automated enforcement in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) environments. However, its adoption is hindered by the complexity of policy languages and the risk of misconfigurations. In this work, we present ARPaCCino, an agentic system that combines Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG), and tool-based validation to automate the generation and verification of PaC rules. Given natural language descriptions of the desired policies, ARPaCCino generates formal Rego rules, assesses IaC compliance, and iteratively refines the IaC configurations to ensure conformance. Thanks to its modular agentic architecture and integration with external tools and knowledge bases, ARPaCCino supports policy validation across a wide range of technologies, including niche or emerging IaC frameworks. Experimental evaluation involving a Terraform-based case study demonstrates ARPaCCino's effectiveness in generating syntactically and semantically correct policies, identifying non-compliant infrastructures, and applying corrective modifications, even when using smaller, open-weight LLMs. Our results highlight the potential of agentic RAG architectures to enhance the automation, reliability, and accessibility of PaC workflows.