Multi-Agent Penetration Testing AI for the Web
This addresses the problem of insufficient security auditing capacity for rapidly developed software, particularly AI-generated code, with practical impact on web application security.
The paper tackles the scalability crisis in security auditing for AI-generated code by presenting MAPTA, a multi-agent system for autonomous web application security assessment, which achieved 76.9% overall success on the XBOW benchmark and discovered critical vulnerabilities in real-world repositories at low cost.
AI-powered development platforms are making software creation accessible to a broader audience, but this democratization has triggered a scalability crisis in security auditing. With studies showing that up to 40% of AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities, the pace of development now vastly outstrips the capacity for thorough security assessment. We present MAPTA, a multi-agent system for autonomous web application security assessment that combines large language model orchestration with tool-grounded execution and end-to-end exploit validation. On the 104-challenge XBOW benchmark, MAPTA achieves 76.9% overall success with perfect performance on SSRF and misconfiguration vulnerabilities, 83% success on broken authorization, and strong results on injection attacks including server-side template injection (85%) and SQL injection (83%). Cross-site scripting (57%) and blind SQL injection (0%) remain challenging. Our comprehensive cost analysis across all challenges totals $21.38 with a median cost of $0.073 for successful attempts versus $0.357 for failures. Success correlates strongly with resource efficiency, enabling practical early-stopping thresholds at approximately 40 tool calls or $0.30 per challenge. MAPTA's real-world findings are impactful given both the popularity of the respective scanned GitHub repositories (8K-70K stars) and MAPTA's low average operating cost of $3.67 per open-source assessment: MAPTA discovered critical vulnerabilities including RCEs, command injections, secret exposure, and arbitrary file write vulnerabilities. Findings are responsibly disclosed, 10 findings are under CVE review.