Authority Backdoor: A Certifiable Backdoor Mechanism for Authoring DNNs

Deep Neural Networks DNNs, as valuable intellectual property, face unauthorized use. Existing protections, such as digital watermarking, are largely passive; they provide only post-hoc ownership verification and cannot actively prevent the illicit use of a stolen model. This work proposes a...

Cybersecurity Policy Adoption in South Africa: Does Public Trust Matter?

This study examines how public perception influences the implementation and adoption of cybersecurity frameworks in South Africa. Using the PRISMA methodology, a systematic literature review was conducted across reputable scholarly databases, yielding 34 relevant sources aligned with predefined...

LLM-Assisted AHP for Explainable Cyber Range Evaluation

Cyber Ranges CRs have emerged as prominent platforms for cybersecurity training and education, especially for Critical Infrastructure CI sectors that face rising cyber threats. One way to address these threats is through hands-on exercises that bridge IT and OT domains to improve defensive...

Defining Cost Function of Steganography with Large Language Models

In this paper, we make the first attempt towards defining cost function of steganography with large language models LLMs, which is totally different from previous works that rely heavily on expert knowledge or require large-scale datasets for cost learning. To achieve this goal, a two-stage...

Comparing AI Agents to Cybersecurity Professionals in Real-World Penetration Testing

We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of 8,00...

LLM-PEA: Leveraging Large Language Models against Phishing Email Attacks

Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models LLMs applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require...

Malicious GenAI Chrome Extensions: Unpacking Data Exfiltration and Malicious Behaviours

The rapid proliferation of AI and GenAI tools has extended to the Chrome Web Store. Cybercriminals are exploiting this trend, deploying malicious Chrome extensions posing as AI tools or impersonating popular GenAI models to target users. These extensions often appear legitimate while secretly...

Chasing Shadows: Pitfalls in LLM Security Research

Large language models LLMs are increasingly prevalent in security research. Their unique characteristics, however, introduce challenges that undermine established paradigms of reproducibility, rigor, and evaluation. Prior work has identified common pitfalls in traditional machine learning researc...

Pattern Based Quantum Key Distribution Using the Five Qubit Perfect Code for Eavesdropper Detection

I propose a new quantum key distribution protocol that uses the five qubit error correction code to detect the presence of eavesdropper reliably. The protocol turns any information theoretical attacks into a classical guess about the pattern. The logical qubit is encoded with a specific pattern...

True Random Number Generators on IQM Spark

Random number generation is fundamental for many modern applications including cryptography, simulations and machine learning. Traditional pseudo-random numbers may offer statistical unpredictability, but are ultimately deterministic. On the other hand, True Random Number Generation TRNG offers...

ByteShield: Adversarially Robust End-To-End Malware Detection through Byte Masking

Research has proven that end-to-end malware detectors are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In response, the research community has proposed defenses based on randomized and derandomized smoothing. However, these techniques remain susceptible to attacks that insert large adversarial payloads. To...

Lightweight Security for Private Networks: Real-World Evaluation of WireGuard

This paper explores WireGuard as a lightweight alternative to IPsec for securing the user plane as well as the control plane in an industrial Open RAN deployment at the Adtran Terafactory in Meiningen. We focus on a realistic scenario where external vendors access their hardware in our 5G factory...

Exposing Vulnerabilities in Counterfeit Prevention Systems Utilizing Physically Unclonable Surface Features

Counterfeit products pose significant risks to public health and safety through infiltrating untrusted supply chains. Among numerous anti-counterfeiting techniques, leveraging inherent, unclonable microscopic irregularities of paper surfaces is an accurate and cost-effective solution. Prior work ...

An Efficient Secret Communication Scheme for the Bosonic Wiretap Channel

We propose a new secret communication scheme over the bosonic wiretap channel. It uses readily available hardware such as lasers and direct photodetectors. The scheme is based on randomness extractors, pulse-position modulation, and Reed-Solomon codes and is therefore computationally efficient. I...

Secure Wireless Communication Using Distributed Coherent Transmission and Spatial Signal Decomposition

We present a new approach to secure wireless communications using coherent distributed transmission of signals that are spatially decomposed between a two-element distributed antenna array. High-accuracy distributed coordination of microwave wireless systems supports the ability to transmit...

LLM-Based Vulnerable Code Augmentation: Generate or Refactor?

Vulnerability code-bases often suffer from severe imbalance, limiting the effectiveness of Deep Learning-based vulnerability classifiers. Data Augmentation could help solve this by mitigating the scarcity of under-represented CWEs. In this context, we investigate LLM-based augmentation for...

Llama-Based Source Code Vulnerability Detection: Prompt Engineering Vs Fine Tuning

The significant increase in software production, driven by the acceleration of development cycles over the past two decades, has led to a steady rise in software vulnerabilities, as shown by statistics published yearly by the CVE program. The automation of the source code vulnerability detection...

Analysis of the Security Design, Engineering, and Implementation of the SecureDNA System

We analyze security aspects of the SecureDNA system regarding its system design, engineering, and implementation. This system enables DNA synthesizers to screen order requests against a database of hazards. By applying novel cryptography, the system aims to keep order requests and the database of...

Integrating Public Input and Technical Expertise for Effective Cybersecurity Policy Formulation

The evolving of digital transformation and increased use of technology comes with increased cyber vulnerabilities, which compromise national security. Cyber-threats become more sophisticated as the technology advances. This emphasises the need for strong risk mitigation strategies. To define stro...

Privacy Practices of Browser Agents

This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However, the automated capabilities that make browser agents...

Breaking ECDSA with Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks: Challenges and Practicality on Modern Smartphones

Smartphones handle sensitive tasks such as messaging and payment and may soon support critical electronic identification through initiatives such as the European Digital Identity EUDI wallet, currently under development. Yet the susceptibility of modern smartphones to physical side-channel analys...

Evaluating Vulnerabilities of Connected Vehicles under Cyber Attacks by Attack-Defense Tree

Connected vehicles represent a key enabler of intelligent transportation systems, where vehicles are equipped with advanced communication, sensing, and computing technologies to interact not only with one another but also with surrounding infrastructures and the environment. Through continuous da...

A Practical Framework for Evaluating Medical AI Security: Reproducible Assessment of Jailbreaking and Privacy Vulnerabilities across Clinical Specialties

Medical Large Language Models LLMs are increasingly deployed for clinical decision support across diverse specialties, yet systematic evaluation of their robustness to adversarial misuse and privacy leakage remains inaccessible to most researchers. Existing security benchmarks require GPU cluster...

Detecting Ambiguity Aversion in Cyberattack Behavior to Inform Cognitive Defense Strategies

Adversaries hackers attempting to infiltrate networks frequently face uncertainty in their operational environments. This research explores the ability to model and detect when they exhibit ambiguity aversion, a cognitive bias reflecting a preference for known versus unknown probabilities. We...

Information-Dense Reasoning for Efficient and Auditable Security Alert Triage

Security Operations Centers face massive, heterogeneous alert streams under minute-level service windows, creating the Alert Triage Latency Paradox: verbose reasoning chains ensure accuracy and compliance but incur prohibitive latency and token costs, while minimal chains sacrifice transparency a...

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Ethical Cybersecurity in Uganda: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Threat Detection in Resource-Constrained Environments

Uganda's rapid digital transformation, supported by national strategies such as Vision 2040 and the Digital Transformation Roadmap, has expanded reliance on networked services while simultaneously increasing exposure to sophisticated cyber threats. In resource-constrained settings, commonly...

Towards Small Language Models for Security Query Generation in SOC Workflows

Analysts in Security Operations Centers routinely query massive telemetry streams using Kusto Query Language KQL. Writing correct KQL requires specialized expertise, and this dependency creates a bottleneck as security teams scale. This paper investigates whether Small Language Models SLMs can...

A Comprehensive Study of Supervised Machine Learning Models for Zero-Day Attack Detection: Analyzing Performance on Imbalanced Data

Among the various types of cyberattacks, identifying zero-day attacks is problematic because they are unknown to security systems as their pattern and characteristics do not match known blacklisted attacks. There are many Machine Learning ML models designed to analyze and detect network attacks,...

RunawayEvil: Jailbreaking the Image-To-Video Generative Models

Image-to-Video I2V generation synthesizes dynamic visual content from image and text inputs, providing significant creative control. However, the security of such multimodal systems, particularly their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks, remains critically underexplored. To bridge this gap, we...

ThinkTrap: Denial-Of-Service Attacks against Black-Box LLM Services Via Infinite Thinking

Large Language Models LLMs have become foundational components in a wide range of applications, including natural language understanding and generation, embodied intelligence, and scientific discovery. As their computational requirements continue to grow, these models are increasingly deployed as...

The Evolution of Agentic AI in Cybersecurity: From Single LLM Reasoners to Multi-Agent Systems and Autonomous Pipelines

Cybersecurity has become one of the earliest adopters of agentic AI, as security operations centers increasingly rely on multi-step reasoning, tool-driven analysis, and rapid decision-making under pressure. While individual large language models can summarize alerts or interpret unstructured...

Managed TLS under Migration: Authentication Authority across CDN and Hosting Transitions

Managed TLS has become a common approach for deploying HTTPS, with platforms generating and storing private keys and automating certificate issuance on behalf of domain operators. This model simplifies operational management but shifts control of authentication material from the domain owner to t...

Hyperflex: A SIMD-Based DFA Model for Deep Packet Inspection

Deep Packet Inspection DPI has been extensively employed for network security. It examines traffic payloads by searching for regular expressions regex with the Deterministic Finite Automaton DFA model. However, as the network bandwidth and ruleset size are increasing rapidly, the conventional DFA...

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Phishing Detection with Transformer-Based Semantic Features

Phishing is a cybercrime in which individuals are deceived into revealing personal information, often resulting in financial loss. These attacks commonly occur through fraudulent messages, misleading advertisements, and compromised legitimate websites. This study proposes a Quantile Regression De...

PrivLLMSwarm: Privacy-Preserving LLM-Driven UAV Swarms for Secure IoT Surveillance

Large Language Models LLMs are emerging as powerful enablers for autonomous reasoning and natural-language coordination in unmanned aerial vehicle UAV swarms operating within Internet of Things IoT environments. However, existing LLM-driven UAV systems process sensitive operational data in...

AgenticCyber: A GenAI-Powered Multi-Agent System for Multimodal Threat Detection and Adaptive Response in Cybersecurity

The increasing complexity of cyber threats in distributed environments demands advanced frameworks for real-time detection and response across multimodal data streams. This paper introduces AgenticCyber, a generative AI powered multi-agent system that orchestrates specialized agents to monitor...

OmniSafeBench-MM: A Unified Benchmark and Toolbox for Multimodal Jailbreak Attack-Defense Evaluation

Recent advances in multi-modal large language models MLLMs have enabled unified perception-reasoning capabilities, yet these systems remain highly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety alignment and induce harmful behaviors. Existing benchmarks such as JailBreakV-28K, MM-SafetyBench,...

BEACON: A Unified Behavioral-Tactical Framework for Explainable Cybercrime Analysis with Large Language Models

Cybercrime increasingly exploits human cognitive biases in addition to technical vulnerabilities, yet most existing analytical frameworks focus primarily on operational aspects and overlook psychological manipulation. This paper proposes BEACON, a unified dual-dimension framework that integrates...

Web Technologies Security in the AI Era: A Survey of CDN-Enhanced Defenses

The modern web stack, which is dominated by browser-based applications and API-first backends, now operates under an adversarial equilibrium where automated, AI-assisted attacks evolve continuously. Content Delivery Networks CDNs and edge computing place programmable defenses closest to users and...

Securing the Model Context Protocol: Defending LLMs against Tool Poisoning and Adversarial Attacks

The Model Context Protocol MCP enables Large Language Models to integrate external tools through structured descriptors, increasing autonomy in decision-making, task execution, and multi-agent workflows. However, this autonomy creates a largely overlooked security gap. Existing defenses focus on...

Characterizing Large-Scale Adversarial Activities through Large-Scale Honey-Nets

The increasing sophistication of cyber threats demands novel approaches to characterize adversarial strategies, particularly those targeting critical infrastructure and IoT ecosystems. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of attacker behavior using HoneyTrap, an adaptive honeypot framework...

Smart Surveillance: Identifying IoT Device Behaviours Using ML-Powered Traffic Analysis

The proliferation of Internet of Things IoT devices has grown exponentially in recent years, introducing significant security challenges. Accurate identification of the types of IoT devices and their associated actions through network traffic analysis is essential to mitigate potential threats. B...

Adobe Acrobat Force-Installed Vulnerable Chrome Extension

Back in 2017, Adobe Acrobat force-installed a vulnerable chrome extension susceptible to cross site scripting...

Transmission Integer Overflow

2017 research from Google where Tavis found that transmission suffered from various integer overflows when parsing torrent files...

LLM Causality Analysis Framework

A comprehensive framework for multi-level causality analysis in Large Language Models LLMs, enabling systematic investigation of safety mechanisms and misbehavior detection across token, neuron, layer, and representation levels. Includes the whitepaper 2512.04841.pdf titled SoK: A Comprehensive...

TeleAI-Safety: A Comprehensive LLM Jailbreaking Benchmark Towards Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluations

While the deployment of large language models LLMs in high-value industries continues to expand, the systematic assessment of their safety against jailbreak and prompt-based attacks remains insufficient. Existing safety evaluation benchmarks and frameworks are often limited by an imbalanced...

Sift or Get off the PoC: Applying Information Retrieval to Vulnerability Research with SiftRank

Security research is fundamentally a problem of resource constraint and consequent prioritization. There is simply too much attack surface and too little time and energy to spend analyzing it all. The most effective security researchers are often those who are most skilled at intuitively deciding...

MalwareBytes Missing Signing / Privilege Escalation

This is older research from 2016 when Google found that MalwareBytes failed to sign packages and download them over a secure channel as well as various other security issues...

Frequency-Matching Quantum Key Distribution

Quantum key distribution QKD enables information-theoretically secure communication against eavesdropping. However, phase instability remains a challenge across many QKD applications, particularly in schemes such as twin-field QKD and measurement-device-independent QKD. The most dominant source o...

Nuclei 3.6.0

Nuclei is a modern, high-performance vulnerability scanner that leverages simple YAML-based templates. It empowers you to design custom vulnerability detection scenarios that mimic real-world conditions, leading to zero false positives...