arXiv subjects

Beijie Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Beijie Liu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Hiding Directions, Leaking Structure: Breaking ArrowCloak through Low-Rank Structure

TEE-shielded inference keeps sensitive state in a trusted execution environment (TEE) while offloading linear algebra to an untrusted accelerator. Wang et al., in Game of Arrows (USENIX Security 2025), showed that five widely adopted lightweight defenses preserve vector directions and introduced ArrowMatch to exploit this leakage. They then proposed ArrowCloak, which adds a different multiple of one shared mask direction to each vector and bases its weight-recovery hardness argument on Learning with Errors (LWE). ArrowCloak successfully reduces ArrowMatch to near-black-box levels. In this paper, we revisit ArrowCloak from cryptographic and structural perspectives. Its LWE formulation does not by itself establish standard LWE hardness: the reduction direction, quantized arithmetic, and joint instance distribution do not meet the required conditions. Reusing one mask direction leaves a recoverable rank-one component across the released matrix. We exploit this structure with our proposed attack, an end-to-end, query-free recovery attack. Given a public checkpoint and the obfuscated weights, the attack removes the masking subspace, recovers the hidden one-to-one correspondence, and reconstructs protected weights without transformation secrets, victim queries, or fine-tuning data. Across six model-task pairs spanning classification, segmentation, and diffusion, the attack recovers 99.92%-100% of hidden vector correspondences. Reconstructed classification models achieve 94.39%-99.54% victim agreement and differ by at most 1.59 percentage points in accuracy; the recovered segmentation model achieves 98.35% output agreement. These findings suggest that lightweight protection should address both per-vector geometry and joint structure across released weights.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Hollow-LLM Attack: Computationally Trivial Weights in Zero-Knowledge Verification of LLM Inference

As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and are predominantly served from remote platforms, verifying faithful inference execution becomes critical (i.e., ensuring that a provider actually executes the advertised model and computational workload rather than a tampered or downsized variant). Zero-knowledge (ZK) LLM inference offers an appealing approach. It promises public verifiability and delivers per-instance guarantees of equational correctness by proving that an output is consistent with executing a public architecture under committed, private weights. Though, we show that it does not bind the effort expended to produce the output. In this paper, we formalize this overlooked effort gap and introduce the Hollow-LLM Attack, in which a dishonest provider retains the declared architecture and parameter count but embeds ghost weights whose algebraic structure collapses effective computation. These witnesses satisfy the verification circuit and yield valid proofs, even though the dishonest model owner, who serves as the prover, performs computation commensurate with a much smaller model than the declared public architecture. This creates a profitable equilibrium in which providers deliver provably correct outputs at small-model cost while overclaiming model size. Accordingly, we characterize concrete families of ghost weights that compose with standard transformer blocks and show that such hollow deployments substantially reduce serving cost with zero quality loss under the same verification circuit. These findings underscore that proof of correct inference is not proof of large-model execution and necessitate additional protections to bind correctness to verifiable computational work.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Training with Confidence: Catching Silent Errors in Deep Learning Training with Automated Proactive Checks

Training deep learning (DL) models is a complex process, making it prone to silent errors that are challenging to detect and diagnose. This paper presents TRAINCHECK, a framework that takes a proactive checking approach to address silent training errors. TRAINCHECK automatically infers invariants tailored for DL training. It uses these invariants to proactively detect silent errors during the training process while providing debugging help. To evaluate TRAINCHECK, we reproduce 20 real-world silent training errors with diverse root causes. TRAINCHECK successfully detects 18 errors within a single training iteration. It also uncovers 6 unknown bugs in popular training libraries that lead to silent errors.

cs.LG↗