Tiny Enough to Break In: Agentic Remote Access Trojans Powered by Small Language Models

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] Tiny Enough to Break In: Agentic Remote Access Trojans Powered by Small Language Models Yuhan You, Suhas Adavelly, Victoria Lovelace, Cameron Berryman, Joel Sadler, Daniel Graham Agentic artificial intelligence raises a new security concern: cyber threats that reason, act, and adapt locally without continuous human direction. We examine this threat through an Agentic Remote Access Trojan (agentic RAT): a Remote Access Trojan augmented with a locally deployed Small Language Model (SLM). The SLM interprets host and network observations, selects actions, recovers from failed steps, and reduces reliance on an external operator. We implement the concept in a controlled, network-isolated lab built from Kali Linux, a Metasploitable2 target, LM Studio, and a local 8-billion-parameter Dolphin-family model. We then test whether a model this small can support autonomous cyber decision-making. This is architecturally feasible today. On commodity hardware, with no cloud service and no operator in the loop, the SLM closed the full observe-decide-act cycle: it interpreted ranked reconnaissance evidence supplied by the controller, selected actions, and obtained verified root-shell access on real vulnerable services. However, it is not yet operationally reliable. The same model hallucinated commands, misread output, and recovered from failure inconsistently, completing 10.9% of a deliberately strict checklist. That gap reflects the limits of today's small models, not a ceiling on the concept. As SLMs improve, agentic endpoint systems may become more practical, more autonomous, and harder to detect, straining existing monitoring, containment, and policy-enforcement mechanisms. Real-world incidents in 2025-2026 already show AI-driven intrusions moving from concept toward practice. That makes the local, self-contained variant we study a plausible near-term direction, not a hypothetical one. Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Formatted in Springer LNCS style Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.03009 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.03009v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.03009 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Daniel Graham [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 01:42:43 UTC (1,171 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs 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?)