Semantic-Aware Contrastive Fine-Tuning: Boosting Multimodal Malware Classification with Discriminative Embeddings

The rapid evolution of malware variants requires robust classification methods to enhance cybersecurity. While Large Language Models LLMs offer potential for generating malware descriptions to aid family classification, their utility is limited by semantic embedding overlaps and misalignment with...

Optimizing the Privacy-Utility Balance Using Synthetic Data and Configurable Perturbation Pipelines

This paper explores the strategic use of modern synthetic data generation and advanced data perturbation techniques to enhance security, maintain analytical utility, and improve operational efficiency when managing large datasets, with a particular focus on the Banking, Financial Services, and...

Crypto-NcRNA: Non-Coding RNA (NcRNA) Based Encryption Algorithm

In the looming post-quantum era, traditional cryptographic systems are increasingly vulnerable to quantum computing attacks that can compromise their mathematical foundations. To address this critical challenge, we propose crypto-ncRNA-a bio-convergent cryptographic framework that leverages the...

AI-Based Vulnerability Analysis of NFT Smart Contracts

With the rapid growth of the NFT market, the security of smart contracts has become crucial. However, existing AI-based detection models for NFT contract vulnerabilities remain limited due to their complexity, while traditional manual methods are time-consuming and costly. This study proposes an...

Biting the CHERI Bullet: Blockers, Enablers and Security Implications of CHERI in Defence

There is growing interest in securing the hardware foundations software stacks build upon. However, before making any investment decision, software and hardware supply chain stakeholders require evidence from realistic, multiple long-term studies of adoption. We present results from a 12 month...

Optimized Approaches to Malware Detection: a Study of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques

Digital systems find it challenging to keep up with cybersecurity threats. The daily emergence of more than 560,000 new malware strains poses significant hazards to the digital ecosystem. The traditional malware detection methods fail to operate properly and yield high false positive rates with l...

Contrastive Learning for Continuous Touch-Based Authentication

Smart mobile devices have become indispensable in modern daily life, where sensitive information is frequently processed, stored, and transmitted-posing critical demands for robust security controls. Given that touchscreens are the primary medium for human-device interaction, continuous user...

From Randomized Response to Randomized Index: Answering Subset Counting Queries with Local Differential Privacy

Local Differential Privacy LDP is the predominant privacy model for safeguarding individual data privacy. Existing perturbation mechanisms typically require perturbing the original values to ensure acceptable privacy, which inevitably results in value distortion and utility deterioration. In this...

Differential Privacy-Driven Framework for Enhancing Heart Disease Prediction

With the rapid digitalization of healthcare systems, there has been a substantial increase in the generation and sharing of private health data. Safeguarding patient information is essential for maintaining consumer trust and ensuring compliance with legal data protection regulations. Machine...

Proof of Useful Intelligence (PoUI): Blockchain Consensus beyond Energy Waste

Blockchain technology enables secure, transparent data management in decentralized systems, supporting applications from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to tokenizing real-world assets like property. Its scalability and sustainability hinge on consensus mechanisms balancing security and efficiency...

Gladinet CentreStack 16.1.10296.56315 Remote Code Execution

Proof of concept exploit for Gladinet CentreStack versions up to 16.1.10296.56315. This software has a deserialization vulnerability due to the CentreStack portal's hardcoded machineKey use, as exploited in the wild in March 2025. This issue is fixed in version 16.4.10315.56368...

Apple Security Advisory 04-16-2025-3

Apple Security Advisory 04-16-2025-3 - tvOS 18.4.1 addresses bypass and code execution vulnerabilities...

Evaluating the Vulnerability of ML-Based Ethereum Phishing Detectors to Single-Feature Adversarial Perturbations

This paper explores the vulnerability of machine learning models to simple single-feature adversarial attacks in the context of Ethereum fraudulent transaction detection. Through comprehensive experimentation, we investigate the impact of various adversarial attack strategies on model performance...

Quantum Autoencoder for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly Detection AD defines the task of identifying observations or events that deviate from typical - or normal - patterns, a critical capability in IT security for recognizing incidents such as system misconfigurations, malware infections, or cyberattacks. In enterprise environments like SAP...

User Profiles: the Achilles' Heel of Web Browsers

Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the operating system or the file system. In this work, we provide the...

Fishing for Phishers: Learning-Based Phishing Detection in Ethereum Transactions

Phishing detection on Ethereum has increasingly leveraged advanced machine learning techniques to identify fraudulent transactions. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the effectiveness of feature selection strategies and the role of graph-based models in enhancing detectio...

A Comment on "E-PoS: Making PoS Decentralized and Fair"

Proof-of-Stake PoS is a prominent Sybil control mechanism for blockchain-based systems. In "e-PoS: Making PoS Decentralized and Fair," Saad et al. TPDS'21 introduced a new Proof-of-Stake protocol, e-PoS, to enhance PoS applications' decentralization and fairness. In this comment paper, we address...

WordPress Verification SMS with TargetSMS 1.5 Remote Code Execution

WordPress Verification SMS with TargetSMS plugin versions 1.5 and below suffer from a logic flaw that allow for remote code execution...

Apple Security Advisory 04-16-2025-4

Apple Security Advisory 04-16-2025-4 - visionOS 2.4.1 addresses bypass and code execution vulnerabilities...

A Systematic Study on the Design of Odd-Sized Highly Nonlinear Boolean Functions Via Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper focuses on the problem of evolving Boolean functions of odd sizes with high nonlinearity, a property of cryptographic relevance. Despite its simple formulation, this problem turns out to be remarkably difficult. We perform a systematic evaluation by considering three solution encodings...

Commvault Command Center Innovation Release 11.38 Remote Code Execution

Commvault Command Center Innovation Release version 11.38 proof of concept pre-authentication remote code execution exploit...

STCL: Curriculum Learning Strategies for Deep Learning Image Steganography Models

Whitepaper called STCL: Curriculum Learning Strategies For Deep Learning Image Steganography Models...

"Shifting Access Control Left" Using Asset and Goal Models

Access control needs have broad design implications, but access control specifications may be elicited before, during, or after these needs are captured. Because access control knowledge is distributed, we need to make knowledge asymmetries more transparent, and use expertise already available to...

Cluster-Aware Attacks on Graph Watermarks

Data from domains such as social networks, healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity can be represented as graph-structured information. Given the sensitive nature of this data and their frequent distribution among collaborators, ensuring secure and attributable sharing is essential. Graph...

Bighuge BLS OSINT Tool 2.1.0 Local Privilege Escalation

Bighuge BLS OSINT Tool BBOT version 2.1.0 is susceptible to a local privilege escalation issue when a malicious module is used. Proof of concept module included...

Apache Parquet 2.9.0 Remote Code Execution

Apache Parquet versions 2.9.0 and below educational simulation of CVE-2025-30065, a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Parquet files. The tool demonstrates how attackers exploit this flaw to gain full system control, while providing mitigation guidance...

Case Study: Fine-Tuning Small Language Models for Accurate and Private CWE Detection in Python Code

Large Language Models LLMs have demonstrated significant capabilities in understanding and analyzing code for security vulnerabilities, such as Common Weakness Enumerations CWEs. However, their reliance on cloud infrastructure and substantial computational requirements pose challenges for analyzi...

Public-Key Quantum Fire and Key-Fire from Classical Oracles

Quantum fire was recently formalized by Bostanci, Nehoran and Zhandry STOC 25. This notion considers a distribution of quantum states that can be efficiently cloned, but cannot be converted into a classical string. Previously, work of Nehoran and Zhandry ITCS 24 showed how to construct quantum fi...

Developing a Blockchain-Based Secure Digital Contents Distribution System

As digital content distribution expands rapidly through online platforms, securing digital media and protecting intellectual property has become increasingly complex. Traditional centralized systems, while widely adopted, suffer from vulnerabilities such as single points of failure and limited...

Integrating Graph Theoretical Approaches in Cybersecurity Education CSCI-RTED

As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, the need for advanced tools to analyze and understand complex cyber environments has become increasingly critical. Graph theory offers a powerful framework for modeling relationships within cyber ecosystems, making it highly applicable to cybersecurity...

CAIBA: Multicast Source Authentication for CAN through Reactive Bit Flipping

Controller Area Networks CANs are the backbone for reliable intra-vehicular communication. Recent cyberattacks have, however, exposed the weaknesses of CAN, which was designed without any security considerations in the 1980s. Current efforts to retrofit security via intrusion detection or message...

Implementing AI Bill of Materials (AI BOM) with SPDX 3.0: a Comprehensive Guide to Creating AI and Dataset Bill of Materials

A Software Bill of Materials SBOM is becoming an increasingly important tool in regulatory and technical spaces to introduce more transparency and security into a project's software supply chain. Artificial intelligence AI projects face unique challenges beyond the security of their software, and...

A Collaborative Intrusion Detection System Using Snort IDS Nodes

Intrusion Detection Systems IDSs are integral to safeguarding networks by detecting and responding to threats from malicious traffic or compromised devices. However, standalone IDS deployments often fall short when addressing the increasing complexity and scale of modern cyberattacks. This paper...

Linux Kernel 6.6.75 Vsock Use-After-Free

Linux kernel version 6.6.75 vsock use-after free proof of concept exploit...

Performance Analysis of MDI-QKD in Thermal-Loss and Phase Noise Channels

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution MDI-QKD, enhances quantum cryptography by mitigating detector-side vulnerabilities. This study analyzes MDI-QKD performance in thermal-loss and phase noise channels, modeled as depolarizing and dephasing channels to capture thermal and phase...

CheatAgent: Attacking LLM-Empowered Recommender Systems Via LLM Agent

Recently, Large Language Model LLM-empowered recommender systems RecSys have brought significant advances in personalized user experience and have attracted considerable attention. Despite the impressive progress, the research question regarding the safety vulnerability of LLM-empowered RecSys...

Give LLMs a Security Course: Securing Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation Via Knowledge Injection

Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation RACG leverages external knowledge to enhance Large Language Models LLMs in code synthesis, improving the functional correctness of the generated code. However, existing RACG systems largely overlook security, leading to substantial risks. Especially, the...

Enhancing Variational Autoencoders with Smooth Robust Latent Encoding

Variational Autoencoders VAEs have played a key role in scaling up diffusion-based generative models, as in Stable Diffusion, yet questions regarding their robustness remain largely underexplored. Although adversarial training has been an established technique for enhancing robustness in predicti...

Evaluating Argon2 Adoption and Effectiveness in Real-World Software

Modern password hashing remains a critical defense against credential cracking, yet the transition from theoretically secure algorithms to robust real-world implementations remains fraught with challenges. This paper presents a dual analysis of Argon2, the Password Hashing Competition winner,...

Security Science (SecSci), Basic Concepts and Mathematical Foundations

This textbook compiles the lecture notes from security courses taught at Oxford in the 2000s, at Royal Holloway in the 2010s, and currently in Hawaii. The early chapters are suitable for a first course in security. The middle chapters have been used in advanced courses. Towards the end there are...

Snorkeling in Dark Waters: a Longitudinal Surface Exploration of Unique Tor Hidden Services (Extended Version)

The Onion Router Tor is a controversial network whose utility is constantly under scrutiny. On the one hand, it allows for anonymous interaction and cooperation of users seeking untraceable navigation on the Internet. This freedom also attracts criminals who aim to thwart law enforcement...

Firewall Regulatory Networks for Autonomous Cyber Defense

In this paper, we present the principles of designing new self-organising and autonomous management protocol to govern the dynamics of bio-inspired decentralized firewall architecture based on Biological Regularity Networks. The new architecture called Firewall Regulatory Networks FRN exhibits th...

WordPress WP Remote Thumbnail 1.3.2 Shell Upload

WordPress WP Remote Thumbnail plugin versions 1.3.2 and below suffer from a remote shell upload vulnerability...

Automated Static Vulnerability Detection Via a Holistic Neuro-Symbolic Approach

Static vulnerability detection is still a challenging problem and demands excessive human efforts, e.g., manual curation of good vulnerability patterns. None of prior works, including classic program analysis or Large Language Model LLM-based approaches, have fully automated such vulnerability...

Seeking Flat Minima over Diverse Surrogates for Improved Adversarial Transferability: a Theoretical Framework and Algorithmic Instantiation

Whitepaper called Seeking Flat Minima Over Diverse Surrogates For Improved Adversarial Transferability: A Theoretical Framework And Algorithmic Instantiation...

Breaking the Flow and the Bank: Stealthy Cyberattacks on Water Network Hydraulics

As water distribution networks WDNs become increasingly connected with digital infrastructures, they face greater exposure to cyberattacks that threaten their operational integrity. Stealthy False Data Injection Attacks SFDIAs are particularly concerning, as they manipulate sensor data to...

Amplified Vulnerabilities: Structured Jailbreak Attacks on LLM-Based Multi-Agent Debate

Multi-Agent Debate MAD, leveraging collaborative interactions among Large Language Models LLMs, aim to enhance reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. However, the security implications of their iterative dialogues and role-playing characteristics, particularly susceptibility to jailbreak attack...

Private Federated Learning Using Preference-Optimized Synthetic Data

In practical settings, differentially private Federated learning DP-FL is the dominant method for training models from private, on-device client data. Recent work has suggested that DP-FL may be enhanced or outperformed by methods that use DP synthetic data Wu et al., 2024; Hou et al., 2024. The...

Automatically Generating Rules of Malicious Software Packages Via Large Language Model

Today's security tools predominantly rely on predefined rules crafted by experts, making them poorly adapted to the emergence of software supply chain attacks. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel tool, RuleLLM, which leverages large language models LLMs to automate rule generation for O...

Resource Reduction in Multiparty Quantum Secret Sharing of Both Classical and Quantum Information under Noisy Scenario

Quantum secret sharing QSS enables secure distribution of information among multiple parties but remains vulnerable to noise. We analyze the effects of bit-flip, phase-flip, and amplitude damping noise on the multiparty QSS for classical message QSSCM and secret sharing of quantum information SSQ...