Deception remains effective against AI-driven attackers.
Adversarial Intelligence
Frontier Lab
Studying how agents reason, act, and adapt across offensive and defensive operations.
Explore researchMission
Advance the science of adversarial intelligence for security
The Adversarial Intelligence Frontier Lab conducts rigorous research at the nexus of agentic systems and cybersecurity. We study the behavior, capabilities, and limitations of offensive and defensive agents; develop new methods for secure agentic systems; and establish frameworks to evaluate their reliability, security, and operational impact.
Our research is grounded in realistic security environments, attack paths, and defensive telemetry. We aim to translate scientific advances into measurable improvements in security systems and share findings, methods, and resources with the broader research and security communities.
Who we are
Research built on how attacks actually unfold.
Our research is built on Horizon3’s attack-fix-verify approach to security. This approach provides a strong foundation for studying attack paths, agent behavior, defensive controls, and the interaction between offensive and defensive systems.
We connect controlled experimentation with evidence from real-world security environments. This enables us to analyze how attacks progress, examine the decisions agents make, identify where defenses succeed or fail, and evaluate whether proposed changes measurably alter security outcomes.
Focus areas
Three questions we are working on now.
Three directions anchor the Lab today:
Cyber deception
Understanding how offensive agents respond to deception.
We study decoy infrastructure designed to detect, redirect, and contain offensive agents. Analyzing how these agents interact with deceptive systems reveals attack objectives, characterizes decision patterns, and provides signals that support attribution.
Governed Agentic Workflows
Ensuring safe & accountable agentic operation in security environments.
We study how multiple agents can collaborate to develop, test, and refine new security capabilities. To keep these multi-agent systems bounded and accountable, we design verifiable safety constraints and control architectures that restrict agent actions and prevent unbounded execution.
Precision defense
Translating offensive findings into validated defensive actions.
We analyze attack root causes to design targeted remediations across multiple infrastructure levels. By retesting the environment, we verify that the applied defense is correct and successfully mitigates the vulnerability or breaks the attack path.
Meet the team
Led by experts in SI and systems security, with a growing research team.
Dr. Z Berkay Celik
Associate Professor at Purdue University
Dr. Z Berkay Celik holds an appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where he concurrently serves as the co-director of the Purdue Security Laboratory (PurSec). His research focuses on the intersection of AI and systems security, including vulnerability discovery, attack analysis, and the security of agentic and autonomous systems. He has led multiple research projects with academic, industry, and government partners.
Knox
Principal Cybersecurity Strategist
Joshua Knox has been a cybersecurity technologist and evangelist for over a decade and is now a Staff Engineer at Horizon3. Before transitioning to the IT industry, Knox was a high school teacher for many years, teaching Python and JavaScript. When he is not working with his team, you can find him working on his home lab, building a new machine, studying for his next cert, or hacking CTF boxes.
Naveen Sunkavally
Distinguished Engineer
Naveen Sunkavally is a Distinguished Engineer at Horizon3, where he contributes to the company's security research and technical innovation. His work focuses on leveraging AI agents and automation to drive deep vulnerability research and explore modern defensive countermeasures, helping security teams stay ahead of real-world threats. Through his research, Naveen helps bridge the gap between emerging threats and practical security validation, supporting Horizon3's mission to help organizations identify and address exploitable weaknesses.
Cameron Denton
Research Staff Member
Cameron’s research centers on cyber deception designed specifically for AI agents. His work explores how different types of honeytokens and honeypots influence agent behavior and where they should be placed to maximize detection and disruption. His work also examines blue team agents that autonomously control and tune the deceptive landscape.
Lili Brush
Research Staff Member
Lili’s research examines both offensive and defensive agentic operations. She studies the behavior of autonomous attack agents, including vulnerability-selection bias and their responses to context-aware deception, and investigates how offensive findings can inform defensive agents in real security environments.
Join the institute
Help build the next generation of offensive and defensive security.
Horizon3 is expanding its research organization and is looking for researchers and engineers who want to work on autonomous attack and defense.
“We built NodeZero to show defenders how attackers can reach critical systems and whether a fix breaks that path. Now we’re researching how offensive and defensive agents can learn from those results, so teams can move faster from a proven attack to a verified fix. That is the next step in the hack, fix, verify loop.”
Snehal Antani
Co-founder and CEO, Horizon3