gradient-untangler

gradient-untangler A local research harness that searches for the exact tokens that make an open-weight language model start its answer the way you specify. Open-weight models ship as ordinary files: config.json, a tokenizer, and one or more .safetensors or .bin shards. A Hugging Face id is only ...

Sovereign by Necessity? Frontier AI Export Controls, Cyber Security, and the Limits of National AI Capability

A small number of firms based in two states produce the most capable frontier AI models. The governments of those states have shown both the legal power and the political will to decide which other countries may use these systems. In June 2026 the United States required a leading developer to...

Small, Free, and Effective: Orchestrating Open-Weight Small Language Models to Outperform Single LLM for Malware Analysis

Malware analysis demands rapid interpretation of complex detonation reports spanning filesystem, network, and process behaviours. While large language models LLMs demonstrate impressive capabilities for technical artifact interpretation, the opacity and escalating API costs of closed-weight...

Beyond Success Rate: Cost-Aware Evaluation of Offensive and Defensive Security Agents

Security-agent evaluations commonly measure peak offensive capability under generous inference budgets, emphasizing vulnerability discovery, exploit development, penetration testing, and CTF completion. Such measurements are useful but incomplete: in operational security, every reasoning step, to...

AI-Generated PowerShell Malware: An Experimental Framework and Dataset

Generative AI has emerged as a significant cybersecurity threat, with several recent attack campaigns leveraging LLMs to generate code for malicious purposes via scripting languages such as PowerShell. Consequently, for cybersecurity analysts, it is imperative to investigate the offensive...

Evaluating LLMs for Real-World Web Vulnerability Detection

Large Language Models LLMs have emerged as a promising tool for automated vulnerability detection, yet their effectiveness on web-specific vulnerabilities remains to be explored. This work benchmarks six frontier Claude Opus 4.6, Codex GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1-pro-preview and open-weight models Qwen...

Evaluating LLMs for Obfuscation Detection and Classification in Android Apps

Android applications apps developers increasingly rely on code obfuscation techniques to hinder reverse engineering and protect intellectual property. However, obfuscation also reduces the effectiveness of static analysis and vulnerability detection tools, creating challenges for Android security...

Criminal AI-as-a-Service in 2026: How the Underground Market Is Operationalizing Cybercrime

Introduction The underground market for criminally oriented generative AI has moved beyond the early hype surrounding 'malicious chatbots.' The gradual integration of AI as a productivity layer within cybercrime operations has become the dominant story, indicating that while the potential for ful...

RecurGuard: Runtime Monitoring for Reasoning-Token Consumption Attacks

Reasoning-capable large language models can be induced to spend their generation budget on injected decoy tasks rather than answering the user's question, causing denial of service when no final answer is produced and denial of wallet when excess output tokens are billed. Input-side safety...

Revisiting Vul-RAG: Reproducibility and Replicability of RAG-Based Vulnerability Detection with Open-Weight Models

Large language models LLMs have shown strong potential for automated software vulnerability detection, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation RAG settings. However, for approaches relying on proprietary models and APIs, reproducibility and replicability remain largely unexplored, raising...

CritBench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities of Large Language Models in IEC 61850 Digital Substation Environments

The advancement of Large Language Models LLMs has raised concerns regarding their dual-use potential in cybersecurity. Existing evaluation frameworks overwhelmingly focus on Information Technology IT environments, failing to capture the constraints, and specialized protocols of Operational...

Exposing the Systematic Vulnerability of Open-Weight Models to Prefill Attacks

As the capabilities of large language models continue to advance, so does their potential for misuse. While closed-source models typically rely on external defenses, open-weight models must primarily depend on internal safeguards to mitigate harmful behavior. Prior red-teaming research has largel...

Aegis: Towards Governance, Integrity, and Security of AI Voice Agents

With the rapid advancement and adoption of Audio Large Language Models ALLMs, voice agents are now being deployed in high-stakes domains such as banking, customer service, and IT support. However, their vulnerabilities to adversarial misuse still remain unexplored. While prior work has examined...

Microsoft Develops Scanner to Detect Backdoors in Open-Weight Large Language Models

Microsoft on Wednesday said it built a lightweight scanner that it said can detect backdoors in open-weight large language models LLMs and improve the overall trust in artificial intelligence AI systems. The tech giant's AI Security team said the scanner leverages three observable signals that ca...

Detecting backdoored language models at scale

Today, we are releasing new research on detecting backdoors in open-weight language models. Our research highlights several key properties of language model backdoors, laying the groundwork for a practical scanner designed to detect backdoored models at scale and improve overall trust in AI...

Detecting backdoored language models at scale

Today, we are releasing new research on detecting backdoors in open-weight language models. Our research highlights several key properties of language model backdoors, laying the groundwork for a practical scanner designed to detect backdoored models at scale and improve overall trust in AI...

Inference-Time Backdoors Via Hidden Instructions in LLM Chat Templates

Open-weight language models are increasingly used in production settings, raising new security challenges. One prominent threat in this context is backdoor attacks, in which adversaries embed hidden behaviors in language models that activate under specific conditions. Previous work has assumed th...

Cisco Finds Open-Weight AI Models Easy to Exploit in Long Chats

Cisco’s new research shows that open-weight AI models, while driving innovation, face serious security risks as multi-turn attacks, including conversational persistence, can bypass safeguards and expose data...

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...