SHIELDS: Automating OS Hardening with Iterative Multi-Agent Remediation

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] SHIELDS: Automating OS Hardening with Iterative Multi-Agent Remediation Andrew Hamara, Dwight Horne, Aldehir Rojas, Timothy Kurniawan, Sophie Lamothe, Vishal Suresh, Nicholas Turoci, Lawrence Wong Security misconfigurations remain a leading cause of OS-level compromise, and manually keeping systems compliant with standards like Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) is a tedious and expensive process. Existing compliance automation tools can reduce some of this burden, but they depend on static, pre-written corrective actions. In this paper, we introduce SHIELDS, a multi-agent system that uses large language models (LLMs) to approach OS hardening as an iterative, feedback-driven process. Instead of applying fixed remediations, SHIELDS continuously proposes fixes and refines them based on feedback from target system execution and validation scans. We evaluate the system across multiple virtual machine configurations using six contemporary LLMs ranging from 20B to 400B parameters, and find that SHIELDS successfully remediates up to 73% of scan findings. Our results also suggest that success in this setting depends less on model size (parameter count) than on effective tool use and information gathering, paving a practical path toward reducing the burden of security compliance in environments where compute is limited or security and privacy needs drive local model use. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05476 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.05476v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05476 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Andrew Hamara [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 21:54:43 UTC (3,179 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)