Make the Adversary Spend More Energy: Generative Deception against Language-Model Attackers in Critical Infrastructure

Language-model attackers consume computational resources as they explore and interact with a target, creating an opportunity for cyber deception to impose costs. Whether such engagements favor the defender requires measuring both sides. We evaluate an autonomous language-model attacker against a decoy that uses a defending language model to analyze attacker commands and select defensive responses. Across 330 sessions, eight model pairs, two attacker profiles and three counter-injection levels, both sides run on identical GPUs and their energy is measured above idle. With runtime thinking disabled, the attacker-to-defender energy ratio has a 95% interval above one in 41 of 48 configurations under an allocation excluding attacker diagnostic calls, and in all 48 when those calls are included. Token ratios remain within approximately a factor of two in configurations without generation-cap truncation, showing that token counts can obscure substantial energy asymmetry. Counter-injection increases attacker tokens by approximately 9% per level without a detectable pooled change in energy consumption. Enabling thinking on both sides increases defender energy by 8–17 times and reverses the exchange for one model pair in the original campaign. We use these findings to motivate a proposed SCADA deception architecture with private physical state per identified adversary and deterministic protocol and process emulation.