Behaviour-Diverse Automatic Penetration Testing: A Curiosity-Driven Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Abstract

Penetration Testing plays a critical role in evaluating the security of a target network by emulating real active adversaries. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is seen as a promising solution to automating the process of penetration tests by reducing human effort and improving reliability. Existing RL solutions focus on finding a specific attack path to impact the target hosts. However, in reality, a diverse range of attack variations are needed to provide comprehensive assessments of the target network's security level. Hence, the attack agents must consider multiple objectives when penetrating the network. Nevertheless, this challenge is not adequately addressed in the existing literature. To this end, we formulate the automatic penetration testing in the Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) framework and propose a Chebyshev decomposition critic to find diverse adversary strategies that balance different objectives in the penetration test. Additionally, the number of available actions increases with the agent consistently probing the target network, making the training process intractable in many practical situations. Thus, we introduce a coverage-based masking mechanism that reduces attention on previously selected actions to help the agent adapt to future exploration. Experimental evaluation on a range of scenarios demonstrates the superiority of our proposed approach when compared to adapted algorithms in terms of multi-objective learning and performance efficiency.