Score: 4

DefenderBench: A Toolkit for Evaluating Language Agents in Cybersecurity Environments

Published: May 31, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2506.00739v3

By: Chiyu Zhang , Marc-Alexandre Cote , Michael Albada and more

BigTech Affiliations: Microsoft

Potential Business Impact:

Tests AI to find computer security problems.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown impressive capabilities in human language comprehension and reasoning, yet their potential in cybersecurity remains underexplored. We introduce DefenderBench, a practical, open-source toolkit for evaluating language agents across offense, defense, and cybersecurity knowledge-based tasks. DefenderBench includes environments for network intrusion, malicious content detection, code vulnerability analysis, and cybersecurity knowledge assessment. It is intentionally designed to be affordable and easily accessible for researchers while providing fair and rigorous assessment. We benchmark several state-of-the-art (SoTA) and popular LLMs, including both open- and closed-weight models, using a standardized agentic framework. Our results show that Claude-3.7-sonnet performs best with a DefenderBench score of 81.65, followed by Claude-3.7-sonnet-think with 78.40, while the best open-weight model, Llama 3.3 70B, is not far behind with a DefenderBench score of 71.81. DefenderBench's modular design allows seamless integration of custom LLMs and tasks, promoting reproducibility and fair comparisons. An anonymized version of DefenderBench is available at https://github.com/microsoft/DefenderBench.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States


Page Count
14 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language