  LLMs have becoming increasingly powerful, both in their benign and malicious
uses. With the increase in capabilities, researchers have been increasingly
interested in their ability to exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In
particular, recent work has conducted preliminary studies on the ability of LLM
agents to autonomously hack websites. However, these studies are limited to
simple vulnerabilities.
  In this work, we show that LLM agents can autonomously exploit one-day
vulnerabilities in real-world systems. To show this, we collected a dataset of
15 one-day vulnerabilities that include ones categorized as critical severity
in the CVE description. When given the CVE description, GPT-4 is capable of
exploiting 87% of these vulnerabilities compared to 0% for every other model we
test (GPT-3.5, open-source LLMs) and open-source vulnerability scanners (ZAP
and Metasploit). Fortunately, our GPT-4 agent requires the CVE description for
high performance: without the description, GPT-4 can exploit only 7% of the
vulnerabilities. Our findings raise questions around the widespread deployment
of highly capable LLM agents.
