Bi-GRPO: Bidirectional Optimization for Jailbreak Backdoor Injection on LLMs

With the rapid advancement of large language models LLMs, their robustness against adversarial manipulations, particularly jailbreak backdoor attacks, has become critically important. Existing approaches to embedding jailbreak triggers--such as supervised fine-tuning SFT, model editing, and...

Cryptographic Backdoor for Neural Networks: Boon and Bane

In this paper we show that cryptographic backdoors in a neural network NN can be highly effective in two directions, namely mounting the attacks as well as in presenting the defenses as well. On the attack side, a carefully planted cryptographic backdoor enables powerful and invisible attack on t...

RAG Security and Privacy: Formalizing the Threat Model and Attack Surface

Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG is an emerging approach in natural language processing that combines large language models LLMs with external document retrieval to produce more accurate and grounded responses. While RAG has shown strong potential in reducing hallucinations and improving factua...

Defending against Stegomalware in Deep Neural Networks with Permutation Symmetry

Deep neural networks are being utilized in a growing number of applications, both in production systems and for personal use. Network checkpoints are as a consequence often shared and distributed on various platforms to ease the development process. This work considers the threat of neural networ...

Security Evaluation of Android Apps in Budget African Mobile Devices

Android's open-source nature facilitates widespread smartphone accessibility, particularly in price-sensitive markets. System and vendor applications that come pre-installed on budget Android devices frequently operate with elevated privileges, yet they receive limited independent examination. To...

Semantic-Aware Fuzzing: an Empirical Framework for LLM-Guided, Reasoning-Driven Input Mutation

Security vulnerabilities in Internet-of-Things devices, mobile platforms, and autonomous systems remain critical. Traditional mutation-based fuzzers -- while effectively explore code paths -- primarily perform byte- or bit-level edits without semantic reasoning. Coverage-guided tools such as AFL+...

Exploiting Page Faults for Covert Communication

We present a novel mechanism to construct a covert channel based on page faults. A page fault is an event that occurs when a process or a thread tries to access a page of memory that is not currently mapped to its address space. The kernel typically responds to this event by performing a context...

Obelix: Mitigating Side-Channels through Dynamic Obfuscation

Trusted execution environments TEEs offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code. While the vendors are slowly introducing hardware-based...

Towards Adapting Federated and Quantum Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection: a Survey

This survey explores the integration of Federated Learning FL with Network Intrusion Detection Systems NIDS, with particular emphasis on deep learning and quantum machine learning approaches. FL enables collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy-a critic...

LLM-Based Vulnerability Discovery through the Lens of Code Metrics

Large language models LLMs excel in many tasks of software engineering, yet progress in leveraging them for vulnerability discovery has stalled in recent years. To understand this phenomenon, we investigate LLMs through the lens of classic code metrics. Surprisingly, we find that a classifier...

FlowCrypt: Flow-Based Lightweight Encryption with Near-Lossless Recovery for Cloud Photo Privacy

The widespread adoption of smartphone photography has led users to increasingly rely on cloud storage for personal photo archiving and sharing, raising critical privacy concerns. Existing deep learning-based image encryption schemes, typically built upon CNNs or GANs, often depend on traditional...

Centralized Vs. Decentralized Security for Space AI Systems? A New Look

This paper investigates the trade-off between centralized and decentralized security management in constellations of satellites to balance security and performance. We highlight three key AI architectures for automated security management: a centralized, b distributed and c federated. The...

SoK: a Systematic Review of Malware Ontologies and Taxonomies and Implications for the Quantum Era

The threat of quantum malware is real and a growing security concern that will have catastrophic scientific and technological impacts, if not addressed early. If weaponised or exploited especially by the wrong hands, malware will undermine highly sophisticated critical systems supported by...

AEAS: Actionable Exploit Assessment System

Security practitioners face growing challenges in exploit assessment, as public vulnerability repositories are increasingly populated with inconsistent and low-quality exploit artifacts. Existing scoring systems, such as CVSS and EPSS, offer limited support for this task. They either rely on...

Rain: Transiently Leaking Data from Public Clouds Using Old Vulnerabilities

Given their vital importance for governments and enterprises around the world, we need to trust public clouds to provide strong security guarantees even in the face of advanced attacks and hardware vulnerabilities. While transient execution vulnerabilities, such as Spectre, have been in the...

SilentStriker: toward Stealthy Bit-Flip Attacks on Large Language Models

The rapid adoption of large language models LLMs in critical domains has spurred extensive research into their security issues. While input manipulation attacks e.g., prompt injection have been well studied, Bit-Flip Attacks BFAs -- which exploit hardware vulnerabilities to corrupt model paramete...

State-Of-The-Art in Software Security Visualization: a Systematic Review

Software security visualization is an interdisciplinary field that combines the technical complexity of cybersecurity, including threat intelligence and compliance monitoring, with visual analytics, transforming complex security data into easily digestible visual formats. As software systems get...

Examining I2P Resilience: Effect of Centrality-Based Attack

This study examines the robustness of I2P, a well-regarded anonymous and decentralized peer-to-peer network designed to ensure anonymity, confidentiality, and circumvention of censorship. Unlike its more widely researched counterpart, TOR, I2P's resilience has received less scholarly attention...

Quantum Public Key Encryption for NISQ Devices

Quantum public-key encryption PKE, where public-keys and/or ciphertexts can be quantum states, is an important primitive in quantum cryptography. Unlike classical PKE e.g., RSA or ECC, quantum PKE can leverage quantum-secure cryptographic assumptions or the principles of quantum mechanics for...

A Comparative Analysis of Ensemble-Based Machine Learning Approaches with Explainable AI for Multi-Class Intrusion Detection in Drone Networks

The growing integration of drones into civilian, commercial, and defense sectors introduces significant cybersecurity concerns, particularly with the increased risk of network-based intrusions targeting drone communication protocols. Detecting and classifying these intrusions is inherently...

Coherence-Driven Inference for Cybersecurity

Large language models LLMs can compile weighted graphs on natural language data to enable automatic coherence-driven inference CDI relevant to red and blue team operations in cybersecurity. This represents an early application of automatic CDI that holds near- to medium-term promise for...

Seeing Is Deceiving: Mirror-Based LiDAR Spoofing for Autonomous Vehicle Deception

Autonomous vehicles AVs rely heavily on LiDAR sensors for accurate 3D perception. We show a novel class of low-cost, passive LiDAR spoofing attacks that exploit mirror-like surfaces to inject or remove objects from an AV's perception. Using planar mirrors to redirect LiDAR beams, these attacks...

Static Security Vulnerability Scanning of Proprietary and Open-Source Software: an Adaptable Process with Variants and Results

Software vulnerabilities remain a significant risk factor in achieving security objectives within software development organizations. This is especially true where either proprietary or open-source software OSS is included in the technological environment. In this paper an end-to-end process with...

LLaVul: a Multimodal LLM for Interpretable Vulnerability Reasoning about Source Code

Increasing complexity in software systems places a growing demand on reasoning tools that unlock vulnerabilities manifest in source code. Many current approaches focus on vulnerability analysis as a classifying task, oversimplifying the nuanced and context-dependent real-world scenarios. Even...

FakeSound2: a Benchmark for Explainable and Generalizable Deepfake Sound Detection

The rapid development of generative audio raises ethical and security concerns stemming from forged data, making deepfake sound detection an important safeguard against the malicious use of such technologies. Although prior studies have explored this task, existing methods largely focus on binary...

Temporal Logic-Based Multi-Vehicle Backdoor Attacks against Offline RL Agents in End-To-End Autonomous Driving

Assessing the safety of autonomous driving AD systems against security threats, particularly backdoor attacks, is a stepping stone for real-world deployment. However, existing works mainly focus on pixel-level triggers that are impractical to deploy in the real world. We address this gap by...

Design and Development of an Intelligent LLM-Based LDAP Honeypot

Cybersecurity threats continue to increase, with a growing number of previously unknown attacks each year targeting both large corporations and smaller entities. This scenario demands the implementation of advanced security measures, not only to mitigate damage but also to anticipate emerging...

Reproducing a Security Risk Assessment Using Computer Aided Design

Security risk assessment is essential in establishing the trustworthiness and reliability of modern systems. While various security risk assessment approaches exist, prevalent applications are "pen and paper" implementations that -- even if performed digitally using computers -- remain prone to...

DecipherGuard: Understanding and Deciphering Jailbreak Prompts for a Safer Deployment of Intelligent Software Systems

Intelligent software systems powered by Large Language Models LLMs are increasingly deployed in critical sectors, raising concerns about their safety during runtime. Through an industry-academic collaboration when deploying an LLM-powered virtual customer assistant, a critical software engineerin...

Incentives and Outcomes in Bug Bounties

Bug bounty programs have contributed significantly to security in technology firms in the last decade, but little is known about the role of reward incentives in producing useful outcomes. We analyze incentives and outcomes in Google's Vulnerability Rewards Program VRP, one of the world's largest...

MoPE: a Mixture of Password Experts for Improving Password Guessing

Textual passwords remain a predominant authentication mechanism in web security. To evaluate their strength, existing research has proposed several data-driven models across various scenarios. However, these models generally treat passwords uniformly, neglecting the structural differences among...

Self-Supervised Learning of Graph Representations for Network Intrusion Detection

Detecting intrusions in network traffic is a challenging task, particularly under limited supervision and constantly evolving attack patterns. While recent works have leveraged graph neural networks for network intrusion detection, they often decouple representation learning from anomaly detectio...

Evaluating LLM Generated Detection Rules in Cybersecurity

LLMs are increasingly pervasive in the security environment, with limited measures of their effectiveness, which limits trust and usefulness to security practitioners. Here, we present an open-source evaluation framework and benchmark metrics for evaluating LLM-generated cybersecurity rules. The...

Security Vulnerabilities in Software Supply Chain for Autonomous Vehicles

The interest in autonomous vehicles AVs for critical missions, including transportation, rescue, surveillance, reconnaissance, and mapping, is growing rapidly due to their significant safety and mobility benefits. AVs consist of complex software systems that leverage artificial intelligence AI,...

"Digital Camouflage": the LLVM Challenge in LLM-Based Malware Detection

Large Language Models LLMs have emerged as promising tools for malware detection by analyzing code semantics, identifying vulnerabilities, and adapting to evolving threats. However, their reliability under adversarial compiler-level obfuscation is yet to be discovered. In this study, we empirical...

A Systematic Survey of Empirical User Studies of Unintentional Information Disclosure in Everyday Digital Interaction

The exchange of personal information in digital environments poses significant risks, including identity theft, privacy breaches, and data misuse. Addressing these challenges requires a deep understanding of user behavior and mental models in diverse contexts. This paper presents a systematic...

Inference Attacks on Encrypted Online Voting Via Traffic Analysis

Online voting enables individuals to participate in elections remotely, offering greater efficiency and accessibility in both governmental and organizational settings. As this method gains popularity, ensuring the security of online voting systems becomes increasingly vital, as the systems...

ConCap: Practical Network Traffic Generation for Flow-Based Intrusion Detection Systems

Network Intrusion Detection Systems NIDS have been studied in research for almost four decades. Yet, despite thousands of papers claiming scientific advances, a non-negligible number of recent works suggest that the findings of prior literature may be questionable. At the root of such a...

Quantum Keystroke Logging

Superdense coding has long been regarded as a secure quantum communication protocol. It is natural to assume that employing logical quantum states with error-correcting capability would not compromise this security. However, in the context of GKP-based quantum communication, we propose a...

How Far Are We? an Empirical Analysis of Current Vulnerability Localization Approaches

Open-source software vulnerability patch detection is a critical component for maintaining software security and ensuring software supply chain integrity. Traditional manual detection methods face significant scalability challenges when processing large volumes of commit histories, while being...

Future-Proofing Cloud Security against Quantum Attacks: Risk, Transition, and Mitigation Strategies

Quantum Computing QC introduces a transformative threat to digital security, with the potential to compromise widely deployed classical cryptographic systems. This survey offers a comprehensive and systematic examination of quantumsafe security for Cloud Computing CC, focusing on the...

MalEval Android Malware Evaluation Framework

This repository contains the source code of MalEval, an evaluation framework for Android malware behavior auditing, focusing on explaining and substantiating malicious behaviors. The framework provides expert-verified reports, curated metadata, and model outputs to enable reproducible evaluation ...

Flying Drones to Locate Cyber-Attackers in LoRaWAN Metropolitan Networks

Today, many critical services and industrial systems rely on wireless networks for interaction with the IoT, hence becoming vulnerable to a broad number of cyber-threats. While detecting this kind of attacks is not difficult with common cyber-security tools, and even trivial for jamming, finding...

Wazuh 4.13.0

Wazuh is a free and open source security platform that unifies XDR and SIEM capabilities. It protects workloads across on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud-based environments. This is the source code release...

Automated Cyber Defense with Generalizable Graph-Based Reinforcement Learning Agents

Deep reinforcement learning RL is emerging as a viable strategy for automated cyber defense ACD. The traditional RL approach represents networks as a list of computers in various states of safety or threat. Unfortunately, these models are forced to overfit to specific network topologies, renderin...

Shai-Hulud npm Worm

Shai-Hulud is a self-replicating worm targeting the npm ecosystem. Once it compromises a developer machine or CI/CD runner, it harvests secrets and uses them to republish itself across multiple npm packages within hours. This advisory holds IoCs and further information...

LenslessMic: Audio Encryption and Authentication Via Lensless Computational Imaging

With society's increasing reliance on digital data sharing, the protection of sensitive information has become critical. Encryption serves as one of the privacy-preserving methods; however, its realization in the audio domain predominantly relies on signal processing or software methods embedded...

TestSSL 3.2.2

testssl.sh is a free command line tool which checks a server's service on any port for the support of TLS/SSL ciphers, protocols as well as recent cryptographic flaws, and much more. It is written in pure bash, makes only use of standard Unix utilities, openssl and last but not least bash sockets...

End-To-End Co-Simulation Testbed for Cybersecurity Research and Development in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems ITS have been widely deployed across major metropolitan regions worldwide to improve roadway safety, optimize traffic flow, and reduce environmental impacts. These systems integrate advanced sensors, communication networks, and data analytics to enable real-time...

Synergizing Static Analysis with Large Language Models for Vulnerability Discovery and Beyond

This report examines the synergy between Large Language Models LLMs and Static Application Security Testing SAST to improve vulnerability discovery. Traditional SAST tools, while effective for proactive security, are limited by high false-positive rates and a lack of contextual understanding...