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HTTP Terminator: Can AI Invent New Attack Techniques? (James Kettle, PortSwigger)

PortSwigger's Director of Research James Kettle built the HTTP Terminator, an autonomous system that automates his own research process (ideation, evaluation, weaponization, cascade) to invent novel HTTP attack techniques, extending his four years of HTTP desync research. The system parsed 138 technical specs into 15,000 inspiration fragments, generated 30,000 unique attack vectors, tested them against live bug-bounty targets, and confirmed roughly 700 vulnerable targets spanning government, financial, and enterprise infrastructure. Kettle found human intuition remained decisive at the "discovery cascade" stage where one finding seeds the next hypothesis, and he has released the HTTP Terminator's source code and a methodology blueprint alongside the full technical paper presented at Black Hat USA; PortSwigger contrasts it with its commercial Burp AT agent.