SoK: Stablecoin Designs, Risks, and the Stablecoin LEGO

Stablecoins have become significant assets in modern finance, with a market capitalization exceeding USD 246 billion May 2025. Yet, despite their systemic importance, a comprehensive and risk-oriented understanding of crucial aspects like their design trade-offs, security dynamics, and...

Screen Hijack: Visual Poisoning of VLM Agents in Mobile Environments

With the growing integration of vision-language models VLMs, mobile agents are now widely used for tasks like UI automation and camera-based user assistance. These agents are often fine-tuned on limited user-generated datasets, leaving them vulnerable to covert threats during the training process...

A Dual-Layer Image Encryption Framework Using Chaotic AES with Dynamic S-Boxes and Steganographic QR Codes

This paper presents a robust image encryption and key distribution framework that integrates an enhanced AES-128 algorithm with chaos theory and advanced steganographic techniques for dual-layer security. The encryption engine features a dynamic ShiftRows operation controlled by a logistic map,...

RAS-Eval: a Comprehensive Benchmark for Security Evaluation of LLM Agents in Real-World Environments

The rapid deployment of Large language model LLM agents in critical domains like healthcare and finance necessitates robust security frameworks. To address the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks for these agents in dynamic environments, we introduce RAS-Eval, a comprehensive security...

Towards Pervasive Distributed Agentic Generative AI -- a State of the Art

The rapid advancement of intelligent agents and Large Language Models LLMs is reshaping the pervasive computing field. Their ability to perceive, reason, and act through natural language understanding enables autonomous problem-solving in complex pervasive environments, including the management o...

A TRNG Implemented Using a Soft-Data Based Sponge Function within a Unified Strong PUF Architecture

Hardware security primitives including True Random Number Generators TRNG and Physical Unclonable Functions PUFs are central components to establishing a root of trust in microelectronic systems. In this paper, we propose a unified PUF-TRNG architecture that leverages a combination of the static...

Don't Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater: How and Why Deep Learning for ARC

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus ARC-AGI presents a formidable challenge for AI systems. Despite the typically low performance on ARC, the deep learning paradigm remains the most effective known strategy for generating skillful state-of-the-art neural networks NN across varied modalities and...

List-Decodable Byzantine Robust PIR: Lower Communication Complexity, Higher Byzantine Tolerance, Smaller List Size

Private Information Retrieval PIR is a privacy-preserving primitive in cryptography. Significant endeavors have been made to address the variant of PIR concerning the malicious servers. Among those endeavors, list-decodable Byzantine robust PIR schemes may tolerate a majority of malicious...

Domain Adaptation for Image Classification of Defects in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In the semiconductor sector, due to high demand but also strong and increasing competition, time to market and quality are key factors in securing significant market share in various application areas. Thanks to the success of deep learning methods in recent years in the computer vision domain,...

MECHA: Multithreaded and Efficient Cryptographic Hardware Access

This paper presents a multithread and efficient cryptographic hardware access MECHA for efficient and fast cryptographic operations that eliminates the need for context switching. Utilizing a UNIX domain socket, MECHA manages multiple requests from multiple applications simultaneously, resulting ...

SoK: Advances and Open Problems in Web Tracking

Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to monitor and profile users across the web. The research...

Understanding Content Moderation Policies and User Experiences in Generative AI Products

While recent research has focused on developing safeguards for generative AI GAI model-level content safety, little is known about how content moderation to prevent malicious content performs for end-users in real-world GAI products. To bridge this gap, we investigated content moderation policies...

Fair Data Exchange with Constant-Time Proofs

The Fair Data Exchange FDE protocol introduced at CCS 2024 offers atomic pay-per-file transfers with constant-size proofs, but its prover and verifier runtimes still scale linearly with the file length n. We collapse these costs to essentially constant by viewing the file as a rate-1 Reed-Solomon...

Movable Antennas Meet Low-Altitude Wireless Networks: Fundamentals, Opportunities, and Future Directions

With the rapid development of low-altitude applications, there is an increasing demand for low-altitude wireless networks LAWNs to simultaneously achieve high-rate communication, precise sensing, and reliable control in the low-altitude airspace. In this paper, we first present a typical system...

Manipulated Regions Localization for Partially Deepfake Audio: a Survey

With the development of audio deepfake techniques, attacks with partially deepfake audio are beginning to rise. Compared to fully deepfake, it is much harder to be identified by the detector due to the partially cryptic manipulation, resulting in higher security risks. Although some studies have...

EBS-CFL: Efficient and Byzantine-robust Secure Clustered Federated Learning

Despite federated learning FL's potential in collaborative learning, its performance has deteriorated due to the data heterogeneity of distributed users. Recently, clustered federated learning CFL has emerged to address this challenge by partitioning users into clusters according to their...

Narrowing the Gap between TEEs Threat Model and Deployment Strategies

Confidential Virtual Machines CVMs provide isolation guarantees for data in use, but their threat model does not include physical level protection and side-channel attacks. Therefore, current deployments rely on trusted cloud providers to host the CVMs' underlying infrastructure. However, TEE...

Busting the Paper Ballot: Voting Meets Adversarial Machine Learning

We show the security risk associated with using machine learning classifiers in United States election tabulators. The central classification task in election tabulation is deciding whether a mark does or does not appear on a bubble associated to an alternative in a contest on the ballot. Barrett...

SoK: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence AI continues to permeate various sectors, safeguarding personal and sensitive data has become increasingly crucial. To address these concerns, privacy-enhancing technologies PETs have emerged as a suite of digital tools that enable data collection and processing while...

FORTRESS: Frontier Risk Evaluation for National Security and Public Safety

The rapid advancement of large language models LLMs introduces dual-use capabilities that could both threaten and bolster national security and public safety NSPS. Models implement safeguards to protect against potential misuse relevant to NSPS and allow for benign users to receive helpful...

Systems-Theoretic and Data-Driven Security Analysis in ML-enabled Medical Devices

The integration of AI/ML into medical devices is rapidly transforming healthcare by enhancing diagnostic and treatment facilities. However, this advancement also introduces serious cybersecurity risks due to the use of complex and often opaque models, extensive interconnectivity, interoperability...

Detecting Hard-Coded Credentials in Software Repositories Via LLMs

Software developers frequently hard-code credentials such as passwords, generic secrets, private keys, and generic tokens in software repositories, even though it is strictly advised against due to the severe threat to the security of the software. These credentials create attack surfaces...

Building Automotive Security on Internet Standards: an Integration of DNSSEC, DANE, and DANCE to Authenticate and Authorize In-Car Services

The automotive industry is undergoing a software-as-a-service transformation that enables software-defined functions and post-sale updates via cloud and vehicle-to-everything communication. Connectivity in cars introduces significant security challenges, as remote attacks on vehicles have become...

Consensus Power Inequality: a Comparative Study of Blockchain Networks

The distribution of consensus power is a cornerstone of decentralization, influencing the security, resilience, and fairness of blockchain networks while ensuring equitable impact among participants. This study provides a rigorous evaluation of consensus power inequality across five prominent...

A Theory of Lending Protocols in DeFi

Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance DeFi, enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols operate without relying on trusted authorities or off-chain...

LASA: Enhancing SoC Security Verification with LLM-Aided Property Generation

Ensuring the security of modern System-on-Chip SoC designs poses significant challenges due to increasing complexity and distributed assets across the intellectual property IP blocks. Formal property verification FPV provides the capability to model and validate design behaviors through security...

Enclosing Prototypical Variational Autoencoder for Explainable Out-of-Distribution Detection

Understanding the decision-making and trusting the reliability of Deep Machine Learning Models is crucial for adopting such methods to safety-relevant applications. We extend self-explainable Prototypical Variational models with autoencoder-based out-of-distribution OOD detection: A Variational...

New Characterization of Full Weight Spectrum One-Orbit Cyclic Subspace Codes

In this paper, we determine the weight distributions of a family of FWS codes and exhibit some equivalence classes of FWS codes under certain conditions. Furthermore, we provide a complete classification for $r$-FWS codes...

Agent Capability Negotiation and Binding Protocol (ACNBP)

As multi-agent systems evolve to encompass increasingly diverse and specialized agents, the challenge of enabling effective collaboration between heterogeneous agents has become paramount, with traditional agent communication protocols often assuming homogeneous environments or predefined...

deepSURF: Detecting Memory Safety Vulnerabilities in Rust through Fuzzing LLM-Augmented Harnesses

Although Rust ensures memory safety by default, it also permits the use of unsafe code, which can introduce memory safety vulnerabilities if misused. Unfortunately, existing tools for detecting memory bugs in Rust typically exhibit limited detection capabilities, inadequately handle Rust-specific...

Watermarking LLM-Generated Datasets in Downstream Tasks

Large Language Models LLMs have experienced rapid advancements, with applications spanning a wide range of fields, including sentiment classification, review generation, and question answering. Due to their efficiency and versatility, researchers and companies increasingly employ LLM-generated da...

ExtendAttack: Attacking Servers of LRMs via Extending Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models LRMs have demonstrated promising performance in complex tasks. However, the resource-consuming reasoning processes may be exploited by attackers to maliciously occupy the resources of the servers, leading to a crash, like the DDoS attack in cyber. To this end, we propose a...

Anonymous Authentication using Attribute-based Encryption

In today's digital age, personal data is constantly at risk of compromise. Attribute-Based Encryption ABE has emerged as a promising approach to privacy-preserving data protection. This paper proposes an anonymous authentication mechanism based on ABE, which allows users to authenticate without...

Enhancing One-run Privacy Auditing with Quantile Regression-Based Membership Inference

Differential privacy DP auditing aims to provide empirical lower bounds on the privacy guarantees of DP mechanisms like DP-SGD. While some existing techniques require many training runs that are prohibitively costly, recent work introduces one-run auditing approaches that effectively audit DP-SGD...

Towards Reliable Forgetting: a Survey on Machine Unlearning Verification, Challenges, and Future Directions

With growing demands for privacy protection, security, and legal compliance e.g., GDPR, machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique for ensuring the controllability and regulatory alignment of machine learning models. However, a fundamental challenge in this field lies in effectively...

ReDASH: Fast and efficient Scaling in Arithmetic Garbled Circuits for Secure Outsourced Inference

Whitepaper called ReDASH: Fast and efficient Scaling in Arithmetic Garbled Circuits for Secure Outsourced Inference...

SecFwT: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models Using Forward-Only Passes

Large language models LLMs have transformed numerous fields, yet their adaptation to specialized tasks in privacy-sensitive domains, such as healthcare and finance, is constrained by the scarcity of accessible training data due to stringent privacy requirements. Secure multi-party computation...

LLM vs. SAST: a Technical Analysis on Detecting Coding Bugs of GPT4-Advanced Data Analysis

With the rapid advancements in Natural Language Processing NLP, large language models LLMs like GPT-4 have gained significant traction in diverse applications, including security vulnerability scanning. This paper investigates the efficacy of GPT-4 in identifying software vulnerabilities compared...

Haptic-Based User Authentication for Tele-robotic System

Tele-operated robots rely on real-time user behavior mapping for remote tasks, but ensuring secure authentication remains a challenge. Traditional methods, such as passwords and static biometrics, are vulnerable to spoofing and replay attacks, particularly in high-stakes, continuous interactions...

Side-Channel Extraction of Dataflow AI Accelerator Hardware Parameters

Dataflow neural network accelerators efficiently process AI tasks on FPGAs, with deployment simplified by ready-to-use frameworks and pre-trained models. However, this convenience makes them vulnerable to malicious actors seeking to reverse engineer valuable Intellectual Property IP through...

Doppelgänger Method: Breaking Role Consistency in LLM Agent via Prompt-based Transferable Adversarial Attack

Since the advent of large language models, prompt engineering now enables the rapid, low-effort creation of diverse autonomous agents that are already in widespread use. Yet this convenience raises urgent concerns about the safety, robustness, and behavioral consistency of the underlying prompts,...

An Efficient Construction of Raz's Two-Source Randomness Extractor with Improved Parameters

Randomness extractors are algorithms that distill weak random sources into near-perfect random numbers. Two-source extractors enable this distillation process by combining two independent weak random sources. Raz's extractor STOC '05 was the first to achieve this in a setting where one source has...

Leaky Thoughts: Large Reasoning Models Are Not Private Thinkers

We study privacy leakage in the reasoning traces of large reasoning models used as personal agents. Unlike final outputs, reasoning traces are often assumed to be internal and safe. We challenge this assumption by showing that reasoning traces frequently contain sensitive user data, which can be...

Characterising Bugs in Jupyter Platform

As a representative literate programming platform, Jupyter is widely adopted by developers, data analysts, and researchers for replication, data sharing, documentation, interactive data visualization, and more. Understanding the bugs in the Jupyter platform is essential for ensuring its...

Secure Time-Modulated Intelligent Reflecting Surface via Generative Flow Networks

We propose a novel directional modulation DM design for OFDM transmitters aided by a time-modulated intelligent reflecting surface TM-IRS. The TM-IRS is configured to preserve the integrity of transmitted signals toward multiple legitimate users while scrambling the signal in all other directions...

International Security Applications of Flexible Hardware-Enabled Guarantees

As AI capabilities advance rapidly, flexible hardware-enabled guarantees flexHEGs offer opportunities to address international security challenges through comprehensive governance frameworks. This report examines how flexHEGs could enable internationally trustworthy AI governance by establishing...

CipherMind: the Longest Codebook in the World

In recent years, the widespread application of large language models has inspired us to consider using inference for communication encryption. We therefore propose CipherMind, which utilizes intermediate results from deterministic fine-tuning of large model inferences as transmission content. The...

Dual Protection Ring: User Profiling Via Differential Privacy and Service Dissemination through Private Information Retrieval

User profiling is crucial in providing personalised services, as it relies on analyzing user behaviour and preferences to deliver targeted services. This approach enhances user experience and promotes heightened engagement. Nevertheless, user profiling also gives rise to noteworthy privacy...

A Locally Differential Private Coding-Assisted Succinct Histogram Protocol

A succinct histogram captures frequent items and their frequencies across clients and has become increasingly important for large-scale, privacy-sensitive machine learning applications. To develop a rigorous framework to guarantee privacy for the succinct histogram problem, local differential...

Unlearning-Enhanced Website Fingerprinting Attack: against Backdoor Poisoning in Anonymous Networks

Website Fingerprinting WF is an effective tool for regulating and governing the dark web. However, its performance can be significantly degraded by backdoor poisoning attacks in practical deployments. This paper aims to address the problem of hidden backdoor poisoning attacks faced by Website...