BlueSTAR: Tiered Agentic Architecture for Autonomous Cyber Defense
Cyber attacks are increasingly automated, narrowing the time available for human analysts to detect, reason about, and respond to intrusions. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising foundation for autonomous cyber defense because they can correlate heterogeneous evidence and reason about previously unseen threats. However, directly applying LLMs to operational security telemetry is impractical: raw logs arrive faster than current models can process them, individual events are often ambiguous, and unconstrained LLM actions can introduce significant operational risk. We present BlueSTAR, a tiered agentic architecture for autonomous cyber defense in enterprise IT/OT networks. BlueSTAR first transforms high-volume security telemetry into compact indicators of compromise. We further introduce a resilience metric that jointly captures attacker reach, impact on mission-critical assets, and disruption caused by defensive actions. We evaluate BlueSTAR on two live enterprise IT/OT cyber ranges using seven attack chains based on real-world intrusion techniques. Across attack chains, BlueSTAR retains the fast containment of deterministic response for known threats while successfully defending against attacks requiring contextual and cross-cycle reasoning, including credential theft, repeated compromise, concurrent attackers, and attacks against physical processes.