PocketAgents: A Manifest-Driven Library of Autonomous Defense Agents

Abstract:Connecting large language models (LLMs) to defensive enforcement requires more than asking a model whether an attack is happening. A defender must decide which model outputs may change the system state, which outputs must be rejected, and how failures should be recorded. We present PocketAgents, a manifest-driven library of autonomous defense agents. Each agent is installed as three data files: a manifest, a prompt, and a runtime context. The shared runtime gives the agent bounded telemetry access and accepts only typed reports whose requested action appears in the manifest. We implemented PocketAgents on top of Perry, a cyber-deception testbed, and evaluated two agents for the Command and Control and Exfiltration tactics in 18 closed-loop trials of a DarkSide-inspired attack on a small enterprise topology. Thirteen trials produced validated network-block actions and contained the attack; four failed schema validation; one produced a valid no-action decision. The experiments show that a typed boundary makes LLM-driven defense measurable, extensible, and attributable.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.21694 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2605.21694v2 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.21694 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.5753/sbseg.2026.28577 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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