RohitD1234/botnet-ctf-traces

Botnet fleet traces: small CTF challenges

Full execution traces of an LLM agent fleet (planner, workers, synthesiser) solving small, self-written capture-the-flag challenges. Every worker runs in its own container and talks to the challenges over the network. The fleet's own verdict is never the score: a grader outside the fleet checks the flags it captured against the run's seed.

These are not NYU CTF Bench runs. The challenges were written for this project.

Contents

Folder	Challenges	Arms × reps	Runs
ctf_web/	web-sqli (SQL injection)	fleet × 1	1
ctf_hard/	pwn-overflow (buffer overflow, 2-step recon → exploit), crypto-rsa	N1, N3, Adecide × 5	15

Each folder holds:

• experiment.json: task, seed, defaults and challenge list
• arms/<arm>.json: what each arm changes
• results.jsonl: one row per run with the effective config, provenance (commit, image ids), score, cost, tokens and root run id
• runs/<arm>-<rep>/main.jsonl: the trace, format botnet.trace/1

Arms in ctf_hard

All on gpt-5.4-mini, seed ctf-hard-v1, score = flags captured / 2.

Arm	Shape	Scores (reps 1–5)	Mean
N1	1 worker, plan → work → synthesise	0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0, 0	0.30
N3	3 workers, plan → work → synthesise	1, 0, 1, 0.5, 0.5	0.60
Adecide	agentic coordinator chooses each step, per-challenge checks on	1, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5	0.60

Variance is high at n = 5. Adecide mostly stalls at 0.5 because max_rounds leaves no room for the second recon → exploit chain.

Trace format

Each main.jsonl is one JSON object per line. The first line is a "record": "trace" header (root run id, integrity check, token usage by role, phase timings, critical path). The rest are run, event, edge and gap records. The event chain is hash-linked; integrity.chain_verified says whether it checked out at export. Content capture is on, so prompts, tool calls and tool output are included.

Notes

• The flags in these traces are derived from the published seeds (ctf-hard-v1, and the ctf_web seed). Treat those seeds as spent for evaluation.
• The machine hostname was replaced with host. No API keys are present.