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Abstract
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are powerful tools for automating complex
tasks. In cybersecurity, researchers have primarily explored their use in
red-team operations such as vulnerability discovery and penetration tests.
Defensive uses for incident response and forensics have received comparatively
less attention and remain at an early stage. This work presents a systematic
study of LLM-agent design for the forensic investigation of realistic web
application attacks. We propose CyberSleuth, an autonomous agent that processes
packet-level traces and application logs to identify the targeted service, the
exploited vulnerability (CVE), and attack success. We evaluate the consequences
of core design decisions - spanning tool integration and agent architecture -
and provide interpretable guidance for practitioners. We benchmark four agent
architectures and six LLM backends on 20 incident scenarios of increasing
complexity, identifying CyberSleuth as the best-performing design. In a
separate set of 10 incidents from 2025, CyberSleuth correctly identifies the
exact CVE in 80% of cases. At last, we conduct a human study with 22 experts,
which rated the reports of CyberSleuth as complete, useful, and coherent. They
also expressed a slight preference for DeepSeek R1, a good news for open source
LLM. To foster progress in defensive LLM research, we release both our
benchmark and the CyberSleuth platform as a foundation for fair, reproducible
evaluation of forensic agents.