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Abstract
AI-powered development platforms are making software creation accessible to a
broader audience, but this democratization has triggered a scalability crisis
in security auditing. With studies showing that up to 40% of AI-generated code
contains vulnerabilities, the pace of development now vastly outstrips the
capacity for thorough security assessment.
We present MAPTA, a multi-agent system for autonomous web application
security assessment that combines large language model orchestration with
tool-grounded execution and end-to-end exploit validation. On the 104-challenge
XBOW benchmark, MAPTA achieves 76.9% overall success with perfect performance
on SSRF and misconfiguration vulnerabilities, 83% success on broken
authorization, and strong results on injection attacks including server-side
template injection (85%) and SQL injection (83%). Cross-site scripting (57%)
and blind SQL injection (0%) remain challenging. Our comprehensive cost
analysis across all challenges totals $21.38 with a median cost of $0.073 for
successful attempts versus $0.357 for failures. Success correlates strongly
with resource efficiency, enabling practical early-stopping thresholds at
approximately 40 tool calls or $0.30 per challenge.
MAPTA's real-world findings are impactful given both the popularity of the
respective scanned GitHub repositories (8K-70K stars) and MAPTA's low average
operating cost of $3.67 per open-source assessment: MAPTA discovered critical
vulnerabilities including RCEs, command injections, secret exposure, and
arbitrary file write vulnerabilities. Findings are responsibly disclosed, 10
findings are under CVE review.