Red Team Redemption: A Structured Comparison of Open-Source Tools for Adversary Emulation

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of scaling red-teaming by systematically comparing nine open-source adversary emulation tools through an 80-question offline assessment and an online user-requirements survey. It combines objective tool-technical evaluation with stakeholder-weighted preferences to produce per-role rankings, identifying MITRE Caldera, Metasploit, and Atomic Red Team as top performers. The methodology emphasizes usability, documentation, automation, and attack-procedure capabilities, offering a practical framework for organizations to select suitable emulation tools. The findings highlight the value of a structured, user-centered approach for enabling reliable, repeatable, and scalable adversary emulation in defense testing, while outlining limitations and directions for future work.

Abstract

Red teams simulate adversaries and conduct sophisticated attacks against defenders without informing them about used tactics in advance. These interactive cyber exercises are highly beneficial to assess and improve the security posture of organizations, detect vulnerabilities, and train employees. Unfortunately, they are also time-consuming and expensive, which often limits their scale or prevents them entirely. To address this situation, adversary emulation tools partially automate attacker behavior and enable fast, continuous, and repeatable security testing even when involved personnel lacks red teaming experience. Currently, a wide range of tools designed for specific use-cases and requirements exist. To obtain an overview of these solutions, we conduct a review and structured comparison of nine open-source adversary emulation tools. To this end, we assemble a questionnaire with 80 questions addressing relevant aspects, including setup, support, documentation, usability, and technical features. In addition, we conduct a user study with domain experts to investigate the importance of these aspects for distinct user roles. Based on the evaluation and user feedback, we rank the tools and find MITRE Caldera, Metasploit, and Atomic Red Team on top.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Overview of the methodology of our research.
• Figure 2: Progression of received stars for the respective GitHub repositories of each tool. Transition from solid to dashed lines indicate the last commit made to the repository.
• Figure 3: Radar plots of scores for categories Installation & Configuration (IC), Community & Support (CS), Documentation (D), Usability (U), and Features & Capabilities (FC).
• Figure 4: Pairwise comparison of category scores.
• Figure 5: Likert scale of domain experts rating the importance of aspects of adversary emulation tools.