Reasoning As an Attack Surface: Adaptive Evolutionary CoT Jailbreaks for LLMs

Large Reasoning Models LRMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, their explicit chain-of-thought CoT mechanism introduces new security risks, making them particularly vulnerable to jailbreak...

An Empirical Evaluation of LLM-Generated Code Security across Prompting Methods

The growing use of Large Language Models LLMs for automated code generation has enhanced software development efficiency, but often at the cost of security. Generated code frequently overlooks critical concerns, leaving it vulnerable to issues such as weak encryption and improper input validation...

Automated Framework to Evaluate and Harden LLM System Instructions against Encoding Attacks

System Instructions in Large Language Models LLMs are commonly used to enforce safety policies, define agent behavior, and protect sensitive operational context in agentic AI applications. These instructions may contain sensitive information such as API credentials, internal policies, and...

Bypassing AI Control Protocols Via Agent-As-A-Proxy Attacks

As AI agents automate critical workloads, they remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection IPI attacks. Current defenses rely on monitoring protocols that jointly evaluate an agent's Chain-of-Thought CoT and tool-use actions to ensure alignment with user intent. We demonstrate that these...

Rethinking On-Device LLM Reasoning: Why Analogical Mapping Outperforms Abstract Thinking for IoT DDoS Detection

The rapid expansion of IoT deployments has intensified cybersecurity threats, notably Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks, characterized by increasingly sophisticated patterns. Leveraging Generative AI through On-Device Large Language Models ODLLMs provides a viable solution for real-time...

CoTDeceptor:Adversarial Code Obfuscation against CoT-Enhanced LLM Code Agents

LLM-based code agentse.g., ChatGPT Codex are increasingly deployed as detector for code review and security auditing tasks. Although CoT-enhanced LLM vulnerability detectors are believed to provide improved robustness against obfuscated malicious code, we find that their reasoning chains and...

ReVul-CoT: Towards Effective Software Vulnerability Assessment with Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Chain-Of-Thought Prompting

Context: Software Vulnerability Assessment SVA plays a vital role in evaluating and ranking vulnerabilities in software systems to ensure their security and reliability. Objective: Although Large Language Models LLMs have recently shown remarkable potential in SVA, they still face two major...

Is Your Prompt Poisoning Code? Defect Induction Rates and Security Mitigation Strategies

Large language models LLMs have become indispensable for automated code generation, yet the quality and security of their outputs remain a critical concern. Existing studies predominantly concentrate on adversarial attacks or inherent flaws within the models. However, a more prevalent yet...

XOffense: an AI-Driven Autonomous Penetration Testing Framework with Offensive Knowledge-Enhanced LLMs and Multi Agent Systems

This work introduces xOffense, an AI-driven, multi-agent penetration testing framework that shifts the process from labor-intensive, expert-driven manual efforts to fully automated, machine-executable workflows capable of scaling seamlessly with computational infrastructure. At its core, xOffense...

CryptoScope: Utilizing Large Language Models for Automated Cryptographic Logic Vulnerability Detection

Cryptographic algorithms are fundamental to modern security, yet their implementations frequently harbor subtle logic flaws that are hard to detect. We introduce CryptoScope, a novel framework for automated cryptographic vulnerability detection powered by Large Language Models LLMs. CryptoScope...

Thought Purity: Defense Paradigm for Chain-Of-Thought Attack

While reinforcement learning-trained Large Reasoning Models LRMs, e.g., Deepseek-R1 demonstrate advanced reasoning capabilities in the evolving Large Language Models LLMs domain, their susceptibility to security threats remains a critical vulnerability. This weakness is particularly evident in...

A Systematization of Security Vulnerabilities in Computer Use Agents

Computer Use Agents CUAs, autonomous systems that interact with software interfaces via browsers or virtual machines, are rapidly being deployed in consumer and enterprise environments. These agents introduce novel attack surfaces and trust boundaries that are not captured by traditional threat...

Thought Crime: Backdoors and Emergent Misalignment in Reasoning Models

Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain e.g., writing insecure code can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional LLMs to reasoning models. We finetune reasoning models on...

Towards Effective Complementary Security Analysis Using Large Language Models

A key challenge in security analysis is the manual evaluation of potential security weaknesses generated by static application security testing SAST tools. Numerous false positives FPs in these reports reduce the effectiveness of security analysis. We propose using Large Language Models LLMs to...

ETrace:Event-Driven Vulnerability Detection in Smart Contracts Via LLM-Based Trace Analysis

With the advance application of blockchain technology in various fields, ensuring the security and stability of smart contracts has emerged as a critical challenge. Current security analysis methodologies in vulnerability detection can be categorized into static analysis and dynamic analysis...

Towards Understanding the Cognitive Habits of Large Reasoning Models

Large Reasoning Models LRMs, which autonomously produce a reasoning Chain of Thought CoT before producing final responses, offer a promising approach to interpreting and monitoring model behaviors. Inspired by the observation that certain CoT patterns -- e.g., "Wait, did I miss anything?'' --...

VulBinLLM: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Detection for Stripped Binaries

Recognizing vulnerabilities in stripped binary files presents a significant challenge in software security. Although some progress has been made in generating human-readable information from decompiled binary files with Large Language Models LLMs, effectively and scalably detecting vulnerabilitie...

CoTGuard: Using Chain-Of-Thought Triggering for Copyright Protection in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

As large language models LLMs evolve into autonomous agents capable of collaborative reasoning and task execution, multi-agent LLM systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving complex problems. However, these systems pose new challenges for copyright protection, particularly when...

CoTSRF: Utilize Chain of Thought As Stealthy and Robust Fingerprint of Large Language Models

Despite providing superior performance, open-source large language models LLMs are vulnerable to abusive usage. To address this issue, recent works propose LLM fingerprinting methods to identify the specific source LLMs behind suspect applications. However, these methods fail to provide stealthy...

Can ChatGPT Perform Image Splicing Detection? A Preliminary Study

Multimodal Large Language Models MLLMs like GPT-4V are capable of reasoning across text and image modalities, showing promise in a variety of complex vision-language tasks. In this preliminary study, we investigate the out-of-the-box capabilities of GPT-4V in the domain of image forensics,...