The Trigger in the Haystack: Extracting and Reconstructing LLM Backdoor Triggers

Detecting whether a model has been poisoned is a longstanding problem in AI security. In this work, we present a practical scanner for identifying sleeper agent-style backdoors in causal language models. Our approach relies on two key findings: first, sleeper agents tend to memorize poisoning dat...

Evaluating Large Language Models for Security Bug Report Prediction

Early detection of security bug reports SBRs is critical for timely vulnerability mitigation. We present an evaluation of prompt-based engineering and fine-tuning approaches for predicting SBRs using Large Language Models LLMs. Our findings reveal a distinct trade-off between the two approaches...

Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-Reasoning-8B Technical Report

We present Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning, the first open-source native reasoning model for cybersecurity. Built upon our previously released Foundation-Sec-8B base model derived from Llama-3.1-8B-Base, the model is trained through a two-stage process combining supervised fine-tuning SFT and...

TrojanPraise: Jailbreak LLMs Via Benign Fine-Tuning

The demand of customized large language models LLMs has led to commercial LLMs offering black-box fine-tuning APIs, yet this convenience introduces a critical security loophole: attackers could jailbreak the LLMs by fine-tuning them with malicious data. Though this security issue has recently bee...

LLMs in Code Vulnerability Analysis: A Proof of Concept

Context: Traditional software security analysis methods struggle to keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern codebases, requiring intelligent automation to detect, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently and accurately. Objective: This paper explores the incorporation of...

An Empirical Evaluation of LLM-Based Approaches for Code Vulnerability Detection: RAG, SFT, and Dual-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models LLMs presents new opportunities for automated software vulnerability detection, a crucial task in securing modern codebases. This paper presents a comparative study on the effectiveness of LLM-based techniques for detecting software vulnerabilities...

Persistent Backdoor Attacks under Continual Fine-Tuning of LLMs

Backdoor attacks embed malicious behaviors into Large Language Models LLMs, enabling adversaries to trigger harmful outputs or bypass safety controls. However, the persistence of the implanted backdoors under user-driven post-deployment continual fine-tuning has been rarely examined. Most prior...

Chasing Shadows: Pitfalls in LLM Security Research

Large language models LLMs are increasingly prevalent in security research. Their unique characteristics, however, introduce challenges that undermine established paradigms of reproducibility, rigor, and evaluation. Prior work has identified common pitfalls in traditional machine learning researc...

Llama-Based Source Code Vulnerability Detection: Prompt Engineering Vs Fine Tuning

The significant increase in software production, driven by the acceleration of development cycles over the past two decades, has led to a steady rise in software vulnerabilities, as shown by statistics published yearly by the CVE program. The automation of the source code vulnerability detection...

Securing Large Language Models (LLMs) from Prompt Injection Attacks

Large Language Models LLMs are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications, but their flexibility exposes them to prompt injection attacks. These attacks leverage the model's instruction-following ability to make it perform malicious tasks. Recent work has proposed JATMO, a task-specif...

BackWeak: Backdooring Knowledge Distillation Simply with Weak Triggers and Fine-Tuning

Knowledge Distillation KD is essential for compressing large models, yet relying on pre-trained "teacher" models downloaded from third-party repositories introduces serious security risks -- most notably backdoor attacks. Existing KD backdoor methods are typically complex and computationally...

Prompt Engineering Vs. Fine-Tuning for LLM-Based Vulnerability Detection in Solana and Algorand Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have emerged as key components within decentralized environments, enabling the automation of transactions through self-executing programs. While these innovations offer significant advantages, they also present potential drawbacks if the smart contract code is not carefully design...

On the Dangers of Poisoned LLMs in Security Automation

This paper investigates some of the risks introduced by "LLM poisoning," the intentional or unintentional introduction of malicious or biased data during model training. We demonstrate how a seemingly improved LLM, fine-tuned on a limited dataset, can introduce significant bias, to the extent tha...

Jailbreak Mimicry: Automated Discovery of Narrative-Based Jailbreaks for Large Language Models

Large language models LLMs remain vulnerable to sophisticated prompt engineering attacks that exploit contextual framing to bypass safety mechanisms, posing significant risks in cybersecurity applications. We introduce Jailbreak Mimicry, a systematic methodology for training compact attacker mode...

REx86: A Local Large Language Model for Assisting in X86 Assembly Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering RE of x86 binaries is indispensable for malware and firmware analysis, but remains slow due to stripped metadata and adversarial obfuscation. Large Language Models LLMs offer potential for improving RE efficiency through automated comprehension and commenting, but cloud-hosted...

Bloodroot: When Watermarking Turns Poisonous for Stealthy Backdoor

Backdoor data poisoning is a crucial technique for ownership protection and defending against malicious attacks. Embedding hidden triggers in training data can manipulate model outputs, enabling provenance verification, and deterring unauthorized use. However, current audio backdoor methods are...

P2P: A Poison-To-Poison Remedy for Reliable Backdoor Defense in LLMs

During fine-tuning, large language models LLMs are increasingly vulnerable to data-poisoning backdoor attacks, which compromise their reliability and trustworthiness. However, existing defense strategies suffer from limited generalization: they only work on specific attack types or task settings...

Backdoor Attacks against Speech Language Models

Large Language Models LLMs and their multimodal extensions are becoming increasingly popular. One common approach to enable multimodality is to cascade domain-specific encoders with an LLM, making the resulting model inherit vulnerabilities from all of its components. In this work, we present the...

Beyond Surface Alignment: Rebuilding LLMs Safety Mechanism Via Probabilistically Ablating Refusal Direction

Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models LLMs. Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and unrobust internal defense mechanisms. These limitations make...

AI Agentic Vulnerability Injection and Transformation with Optimized Reasoning

The increasing complexity of software systems and the sophistication of cyber-attacks have underscored the critical need for effective automated vulnerability detection and repair systems. Traditional methods, such as static program analysis, face significant challenges related to scalability,...