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George Nicolaou

Publications and source records attributed to George Nicolaou.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Dynamic Cyber Ranges

As LLM-driven agents advance in cybersecurity, Jeopardy CTF benchmarks are approaching saturation and cyber ranges, the natural next evaluation frontier, offer diminishing resistance under their current static design. We validate this observation by deploying an LLM-driven Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) agent across three tiers of increasingly realistic infrastructure (PRO Labs, MHBench, military-grade CYBER RANGES). To counteract this trend, we propose Dynamic Cyber Ranges: cyber range environments augmented with LLM-driven Defender agents that harden infrastructure, monitor for intrusions, and respond in real time. Across evaluated scenarios, Defender agents reduce attacker success to 0-55%, achieving complete prevention on multiple configurations. Since attacker and defender agents draw from the same underlying model capabilities, Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom as models improve. Notably, a smaller, specialized on-premise model (alias2-mini) matched the frontier model's defensive outcomes on multiple scenarios under identical, untuned prompts, and detected the attacker 10x faster on a complex enterprise scenario, suggesting that privacy-preserving on-premise models can serve as competent defenders against frontier-class attackers. The experiments further surface emergent agent behaviors, including scope expansion and prompt exfiltration, with implications for AI benchmark integrity and agentic system design.

cs.CR↗

Relationship between polytropic index and temperature anisotropy in space plasmas

The paper develops a theoretical relationship between the polytropic index and the temperature anisotropy that may characterize space plasmas. The derivation is based on the correlation among the kinetic energies of particles with velocities described by anisotropic kappa distributions. The correlation coefficient depends on the effective dimensionality of the velocity distribution function, having its shape determined by the temperature anisotropies caused by the ambient magnetic field; on the other hand, the effective dimensionality is directly dependent on the polytropic index. This analysis leads to the connection between the correlation coefficient, effective dimensionality of velocity space, and the polytropic index, with the ratio of temperature anisotropy. Moreover, a data and statistical analysis is performed to test the application of the theoretically developed model, in the solar wind proton plasma near 1 AU. The derived theoretical relationship is in good agreement with observations, showing that the lowest and classical value of the adiabatic polytropic index occurs in the isotropic case, while higher indices characterize anisotropic plasmas. Finally, possible extensions of the theory considering (i) non-adiabatic polytropic behavior, and (ii) more general distributions, are further discussed.

physics.space-ph↗

Anisotropic kappa distributions I: Formulation based on particle correlations

We develop the theoretical basis for the connection of the variety of anisotropic distributions with the statistical correlations among particles velocity components. By examining the most common anisotropic distribution, we derive the correlation coefficient among particle energies, show how this correlation is connected to the effective dimensionality of the velocity distribution, and derive the connection between anisotropy and adiabatic polytropic index. Having established the importance of correlation among particles in the formulation of anisotropic kappa distributions, we generalize these distributions within the framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics and based on the types of homogeneous or heterogeneous correlations among the particles velocity components. The formulation of the developed generalized distributions mediates the main two types of anisotropic kappa distributions, considering (a) equal correlations, or (b) zero correlations, among different velocity components. Finally, the developed anisotropic kappa distributions are expressed in terms of the energy and pitch angle in arbitrary reference frames.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗