arXiv:2509.20008cs.LGcs.CR2025-09被引 2

用强化学习提升网络渗透测试的鲁棒性,解决观测不全的难题。

Learning Robust Penetration Testing Policies under Partial Observability: A systematic evaluation

  • 通过历史信息聚合缓解观测不全问题
  • 采用帧堆叠和LSTM等方法使收敛速度提升4倍
  • 适合安全研究与自动化攻防领域从业者

渗透测试作为模拟网络攻击以发现安全漏洞的序列决策任务,非常适合用强化学习(RL)自动化。然而,与大多数真实世界应用类似,部分可观测性带来了主要挑战,因为它破坏了马尔可夫决策过程(MDP)中的马尔可夫性质。部分可观测MDP需要历史聚合或信念状态估计来学习有效策略。本文在不同规模的主机网络上研究随机、部分可观测的渗透测试场景,旨在通过更具挑战性和代表性的基准更好地反映现实复杂性。该方法有助于开发更鲁棒且可迁移的策略,这对于确保在多样且不可预测的真实环境中可靠运行至关重要。以原始近端策略优化(PPO)为基线,我们系统比较了多种旨在缓解部分可观测性的基于PPO的变体,包括帧堆叠、加入历史信息、使用LSTM或TrXL架构。我们在不同规模的主机网络上对这些算法进行了全面实验。结果表明,该任务极大受益于历史信息聚合,收敛速度比其他方法快达四倍。通过对算法学习到的策略进行人工检查,揭示出清晰差异,提供了超越定量结果的深入洞察。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Penetration testing, the simulation of cyberattacks to identify security vulnerabilities, presents a sequential decision-making problem well-suited for reinforcement learning (RL) automation. Like many applications of RL to real-world problems, partial observability presents a major challenge, as it invalidates the Markov property present in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Partially Observable MDPs require history aggregation or belief state estimation to learn successful policies. We investigate stochastic, partially observable penetration testing scenarios over host networks of varying size, aiming to better reflect real-world complexity through more challenging and representative benchmarks. This approach leads to the development of more robust and transferable policies, which are crucial for ensuring reliable performance across diverse and unpredictable real-world environments. Using vanilla Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a baseline, we compare a selection of PPO-based variants designed to mitigate partial observability, including frame-stacking, augmenting observations with historical information, and employing LSTM or TrXL architectures. We conduct a systematic empirical analysis of these algorithms across different host network sizes. We find that this task greatly benefits from history aggregation. Converging up to four times faster than other approaches. Manual inspection of the learned policies by the algorithms reveals clear distinctions and provides insights that go beyond quantitative results.

强化学习渗透测试部分可观测策略优化

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