Attribution of Failed Initial Access Attempts

Determine, for failed offensive initial access attempts by CAI’s Red Team Agent in Hack The Box Battlegrounds experiments, whether the failure was caused by undetected vulnerabilities, incorrect exploitation attempts, successful defensive measures, or agent inaction, to enable accurate attribution of offensive failure modes under the study’s experimental conditions.

Background

Within the Limitations section, the authors highlight an evaluation ambiguity: when the Red Team Agent did not achieve initial access, the paper lacked instrumentation to identify the specific reason for failure. Hack The Box does not provide vulnerability inventories for targets, preventing coverage assessment and making it difficult to separate agent shortcomings from strong defense or missing vulnerabilities.

This ambiguity impacts interpretation of offensive performance and comparative conclusions across attack and defense. The authors note that future experiments should use environments with known vulnerability sets to disambiguate outcomes. Resolving this uncertainty would improve the reliability of measurements and strengthen causal analysis of agent behavior.