DarKnight: Retrieval-Guided Agentic Framework for Breaking Dark Web CAPTCHA Gates
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) investigators who monitor dark web marketplaces for leaked credentials and breach listings must pass the diverse CAPTCHAs that operators deploy to block automated collection. Existing solvers either need unscalable per-site fine-tuning or rely on commercial Vision-Language Model (VLM) APIs, which surrender operational sovereignty: provider policies, Tor-exit blocking, government regulation, or model updates outside the investigator's control can halt or alter the solver overnight, and per-call costs recur with every session and retry. We present DarKnight, a self-improving agentic framework designed to run on a single workstation GPU inside an investigator's Tor crawler and solve CAPTCHAs with small, locally hosted open-weight VLMs that no provider decision can withdraw, without per-market training or third-party services. For each CAPTCHA, DarKnight retrieves successful and failed past attempts on similar images (dual-signal RAG), composes an image-specific preprocessing pipeline, and learns from the site's pass/fail verdict. In a case study on four real-world dark web marketplaces, agentic tool selection outperformed parameter scaling. A deployable open-weight VLM with DarKnight reached 83.2\% on the most heavily defended market, 37.2 percentage points above its base model, outperforming even the frontier Claude Opus~5 (44%). DarKnight recovered 48.2% of baseline failures at a 7.6% degeneration cost, indicating that selective tool use can avoid much of the degradation caused by uniform preprocessing.