Apple iMessage Zero-Click Key Theft / Remote Code Execution

This is a strategic public disclosure of a zero-click iMessage exploit chain that was discovered live on iOS 18.2 and remained unpatched through iOS 18.4. It enabled Secure Enclave key theft, wormable remote code execution, and undetectable crypto wallet exfiltration. Despite responsible...

Your Agent Can Defend Itself against Backdoor Attacks

Despite their growing adoption across domains, large language model LLM-powered agents face significant security risks from backdoor attacks during training and fine-tuning. These compromised agents can subsequently be manipulated to execute malicious operations when presented with specific...

ZTaint-Havoc: from Havoc Mode to Zero-Execution Fuzzing-Driven Taint Inference

Fuzzing is a widely used technique for discovering software vulnerabilities, but identifying hot bytes that influence program behavior remains challenging. Traditional taint analysis can track such bytes white-box, but suffers from scalability issue. Fuzzing-Driven Taint Inference FTI offers a...

Mono: Is Your "Clean" Vulnerability Dataset Really Solvable? Exposing and Trapping Undecidable Patches and Beyond

The quantity and quality of vulnerability datasets are essential for developing deep learning solutions to vulnerability-related tasks. Due to the limited availability of vulnerabilities, a common approach to building such datasets is analyzing security patches in source code. However, existing...

Lightweight and High-Throughput Secure Logging for Internet of Things and Cold Cloud Continuum

The growing deployment of resource-limited Internet of Things IoT devices and their expanding attack surfaces demand efficient and scalable security mechanisms. System logs are vital for the trust and auditability of IoT, and offloading their maintenance to a Cold Storage-as-a-Service Cold-STaaS...

One Patch to Rule Them All: Transforming Static Patches into Dynamic Attacks in the Physical World

Numerous methods have been proposed to generate physical adversarial patches PAPs against real-world machine learning systems. However, each existing PAP typically supports only a single, fixed attack goal, and switching to a different objective requires re-generating and re-deploying a new PAP...

TimeWak: Temporal Chained-Hashing Watermark for Time Series Data

Synthetic time series generated by diffusion models enable sharing privacy-sensitive datasets, such as patients' functional MRI records. Key criteria for synthetic data include high data utility and traceability to verify the data source. Recent watermarking methods embed in homogeneous latent...

SAGE: Exploring the Boundaries of Unsafe Concept Domain with Semantic-Augment Erasing

Diffusion models DMs have achieved significant progress in text-to-image generation. However, the inevitable inclusion of sensitive information during pre-training poses safety risks, such as unsafe content generation and copyright infringement. Concept erasing finetunes weights to unlearn...

Boosting Gradient Leakage Attacks: Data Reconstruction in Realistic FL Settings

Federated learning FL enables collaborative model training among multiple clients without the need to expose raw data. Its ability to safeguard privacy, at the heart of FL, has recently been a hot-button debate topic. To elaborate, several studies have introduced a type of attacks known as gradie...

On the Ethics of Using LLMs for Offensive Security

Large Language Models LLMs have rapidly evolved over the past few years and are currently evaluated for their efficacy within the domain of offensive cyber-security. While initial forays showcase the potential of LLMs to enhance security research, they also raise critical ethical concerns regardi...

WGLE:Backdoor-Free and Multi-Bit Black-Box Watermarking for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks GNNs are increasingly deployed in graph-related applications, making ownership verification critical to protect their intellectual property against model theft. Fingerprinting and black-box watermarking are two main methods. However, the former relies on determining model...

Striking Back at Cobalt: Using Network Traffic Metadata to Detect Cobalt Strike Masquerading Command and Control Channels

Off-the-shelf software for Command and Control is often used by attackers and legitimate pentesters looking for discretion. Among other functionalities, these tools facilitate the customization of their network traffic so it can mimic popular websites, thereby increasing their secrecy. Cobalt...

ABC-FHE : a Resource-Efficient Accelerator Enabling Bootstrappable Parameters for Client-Side Fully Homomorphic Encryption

As the demand for privacy-preserving computation continues to grow, fully homomorphic encryption FHE-which enables continuous computation on encrypted data-has become a critical solution. However, its adoption is hindered by significant computational overhead, requiring 10000-fold more computatio...

SmartAttack: Air-Gap Attack Via Smartwatches

Air-gapped systems are considered highly secure against data leaks due to their physical isolation from external networks. Despite this protection, ultrasonic communication has been demonstrated as an effective method for exfiltrating data from such systems. While smartphones have been extensivel...

Certified Unlearning for Neural Networks

We address the problem of machine unlearning, where the goal is to remove the influence of specific training data from a model upon request, motivated by privacy concerns and regulatory requirements such as the "right to be forgotten." Unfortunately, existing methods rely on restrictive assumptio...

Auditing Black-Box LLM APIs with a Rank-Based Uniformity Test

As API access becomes a primary interface to large language models LLMs, users often interact with black-box systems that offer little transparency into the deployed model. To reduce costs or maliciously alter model behaviors, API providers may discreetly serve quantized or fine-tuned variants,...

Secure Data Access in Cloud Environments Using Quantum Cryptography

Cloud computing has made storing and accessing data easier but keeping it secure is a big challenge nowadays. Traditional methods of ensuring data may not be strong enough in the future when powerful quantum computers become available. To solve this problem, this study uses quantum cryptography t...

Lightweight Electronic Signatures and Reliable Access Control Included in Sensor Networks to Prevent Cyber Attacks from Modifying Patient Data

Digital terrorism is a major cause of securing patient/healthcare providers data and information. Sensitive topics that may have an impact on a patient's health or even national security include patient health records and information on healthcare providers. Health databases and data sets have be...

Adversarial Text Generation with Dynamic Contextual Perturbation

Adversarial attacks on Natural Language Processing NLP models expose vulnerabilities by introducing subtle perturbations to input text, often leading to misclassification while maintaining human readability. Existing methods typically focus on word-level or local text segment alterations,...

What Is the Cost of Differential Privacy for Deep Learning-Based Trajectory Generation?

While location trajectories offer valuable insights, they also reveal sensitive personal information. Differential Privacy DP offers formal protection, but achieving a favourable utility-privacy trade-off remains challenging. Recent works explore deep learning-based generative models to produce...

Gh0stEdit: Exploiting Layer-Based Access Vulnerability within Docker Container Images

Whitepaper called Gh0stEdit: Exploiting Layer-Based Access Vulnerability Within Docker Container Images...

Doxing Via the Lens: Revealing Location-Related Privacy Leakage on Multi-Modal Large Reasoning Models

Recent advances in multi-modal large reasoning models MLRMs have shown significant ability to interpret complex visual content. While these models enable impressive reasoning capabilities, they also introduce novel and underexplored privacy risks. In this paper, we identify a novel category of...

Attacking Attention of Foundation Models Disrupts Downstream Tasks

Foundation models represent the most prominent and recent paradigm shift in artificial intelligence. Foundation models are large models, trained on broad data that deliver high accuracy in many downstream tasks, often without fine-tuning. For this reason, models such as CLIP , DINO or Vision...

Network Threat Detection: Addressing Class Imbalanced Data with Deep Forest

With the rapid expansion of Internet of Things IoT networks, detecting malicious traffic in real-time has become a critical cybersecurity challenge. This research addresses the detection challenges by presenting a comprehensive empirical analysis of machine learning techniques for malware detecti...

Stark-Coleman Invariants and Quantum Lower Bounds: an Integrated Framework for Real Quadratic Fields

Class groups of real quadratic fields represent fundamental structures in algebraic number theory with significant computational implications. While Stark's conjecture establishes theoretical connections between special units and class group structures, explicit constructions have remained elusiv...

Unraveling Ethereum'S Mempool: the Impact of Fee Fairness, Transaction Prioritization, and Consensus Efficiency

Ethereum's transaction pool mempool dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool clearance rates, and block finalization times in Ethereum's...

How Good LLM-Generated Password Policies Are?

Generative AI technologies, particularly Large Language Models LLMs, are rapidly being adopted across industry, academia, and government sectors, owing to their remarkable capabilities in natural language processing. However, despite their strengths, the inconsistency and unpredictability of LLM...

WordPress Spreadsheet Price Changer 2.4.37 Privilege Escalation

WordPress Spreadsheet Price Changer plugin versions 2.4.37 and below suffer from a privilege escalation vulnerability...

Towards Generalized Source Tracing for Codec-Based Deepfake Speech

Recent attempts at source tracing for codec-based deepfake speech CodecFake, generated by neural audio codec-based speech generation CoSG models, have exhibited suboptimal performance. However, how to train source tracing models using simulated CoSG data while maintaining strong performance on re...

"Vcd2df" -- Leveraging Data Science Insights for Hardware Security Research

In this work, we hope to expand the universe of security practitioners of open-source hardware by creating a bridge from hardware design languages HDLs to data science languages like Python and R through novel libraries that convert VCD value change dump files into data frames, the expected input...

Distortion Search, a Web Search Privacy Heuristic

Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search privacy enhancing tools available today require that the...

LLMs Caught in the Crossfire: Malware Requests and Jailbreak Challenges

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models LLMs has heightened concerns about their security, particularly their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs. While prior research has been conducted on general security capabilities of LLMs,...

A Red Teaming Roadmap Towards System-Level Safety

Large Language Model LLM safeguards, which implement request refusals, have become a widely adopted mitigation strategy against misuse. At the intersection of adversarial machine learning and AI safety, safeguard red teaming has effectively identified critical vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art...

Exposing Hidden Backdoors in NFT Smart Contracts: a Static Security Analysis of Rug Pull Patterns

The explosive growth of Non-Fungible Tokens NFTs has revolutionized digital ownership by enabling the creation, exchange, and monetization of unique assets on blockchain networks. However, this surge in popularity has also given rise to a disturbing trend: the emergence of rug pulls - fraudulent...

Understanding the Error Sensitivity of Privacy-Aware Computing

Homomorphic Encryption HE enables secure computation on encrypted data without decryption, allowing a great opportunity for privacy-preserving computation. In particular, domains such as healthcare, finance, and government, where data privacy and security are of utmost importance, can benefit fro...

Interpreting Agent Behaviors in Reinforcement-Learning-Based Cyber-Battle Simulation Platforms

We analyze two open source deep reinforcement learning agents submitted to the CAGE Challenge 2 cyber defense challenge, where each competitor submitted an agent to defend a simulated network against each of several provided rules-based attack agents. We demonstrate that one can gain...

A Systematic Literature Review on Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) for Secure Cloud Computing

As cloud environments become widespread, cybersecurity has emerged as a top priority across areas such as networks, communication, data privacy, response times, and availability. Various sectors, including industries, healthcare, and government, have recently faced cyberattacks targeting their...

Private Evolution Converges

Private Evolution PE is a promising training-free method for differentially private DP synthetic data generation. While it achieves strong performance in some domains e.g., images and text, its behavior in others e.g., tabular data is less consistent. To date, the only theoretical analysis of the...

Minoritised Ethnic People'S Security and Privacy Concerns and Responses Towards Essential Online Services

Minoritised ethnic people are marginalised in society, and therefore at a higher risk of adverse online harms, including those arising from the loss of security and privacy of personal data. Despite this, there has been very little research focused on minoritised ethnic people's security and...

Secure Distributed Learning for CAVs: Defending against Gradient Leakage with Leveled Homomorphic Encryption

Federated Learning FL enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, making it a promising approach for privacy-preserving machine learning in domains like Connected and Autonomous Vehicles CAVs. However, recent studies have shown that exchanged model...

Profiling Electric Vehicles Via Early Charging Voltage Patterns

Electric Vehicles EVs are rapidly gaining adoption as a sustainable alternative to fuel-powered vehicles, making secure charging infrastructure essential. Despite traditional authentication protocols, recent results showed that attackers may steal energy through tailored relay attacks. One...

PoSyn: Secure Power Side-Channel Aware Synthesis

Power Side-Channel PSC attacks exploit power consumption patterns to extract sensitive information, posing risks to cryptographic operations crucial for secure systems. Traditional countermeasures, such as masking, face challenges including complex integration during synthesis, substantial area...

Correlated Noise Mechanisms for Differentially Private Learning

This monograph explores the design and analysis of correlated noise mechanisms for differential privacy DP, focusing on their application to private training of AI and machine learning models via the core primitive of estimation of weighted prefix sums. While typical DP mechanisms inject...

Are Trees Really Green? A Detection Approach of IoT Malware Attacks

Nowadays, the Internet of Things IoT is widely employed, and its usage is growing exponentially because it facilitates remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data-driven decision making, especially in the healthcare and industrial sectors. However, IoT devices remain vulnerable due to the...

LLM Unlearning Should Be Form-Independent

Large Language Model LLM unlearning aims to erase or suppress undesirable knowledge within the model, offering promise for controlling harmful or private information to prevent misuse. However, recent studies highlight its limited efficacy in real-world scenarios, hindering practical adoption. In...

Walrus: an Efficient Decentralized Storage Network

Decentralized storage systems face a fundamental trade-off between replication overhead, recovery efficiency, and security guarantees. Current approaches either rely on full replication, incurring substantial storage costs, or employ trivial erasure coding schemes that struggle with efficient...

Mind the Gap: Revealing Security Barriers through Situational Awareness of Small and Medium Business Key Decision-Makers

Key decision-makers in small and medium businesses SMBs often lack the awareness and knowledge to implement cybersecurity measures effectively. To gain a deeper understanding of how SMB executives navigate cybersecurity decision-making, we deployed a mixed-method approach, conducting...

Securing Unbounded Differential Privacy against Timing Attacks

Recent works have started to theoretically investigate how we can protect differentially private programs against timing attacks, by making the joint distribution the output and the runtime differentially private JOT-DP. However, the existing approaches to JOT-DP have some limitations, particular...

Data-Driven Understanding of Security Issue Reporting in GitHub Repositories of Open Source Npm Packages

The npm Node Package Manager ecosystem is the most important package manager for JavaScript development with millions of users. Consequently, a plethora of earlier work investigated how vulnerability reporting, patch propagation, and in general detection as well as resolution of security issues i...

MalGEN: a Generative Agent Framework for Modeling Malicious Software in Cybersecurity

The dual use nature of Large Language Models LLMs presents a growing challenge in cybersecurity. While LLM enhances automation and reasoning for defenders, they also introduce new risks, particularly their potential to be misused for generating evasive, AI crafted malware. Despite this emerging...