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Gregory D. Moody

Publications and source records attributed to Gregory D. Moody.

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Code as a Weapon: A Consensus-Labeled Prompt Bank for Measuring Coding-Model Compliance with Malicious-Code Requests

A general-purpose language model that answers a harmful question returns text; a coding model that complies with a malicious request can return a working weapon: a keylogger, ransomware, an exploit that runs as written. This asymmetry in the severity of a single act of compliance implies coding-specialized models should clear a higher refusal bar than general-purpose chat models, not a lower one, yet the field cannot tell whether they do. Refusal benchmarks for malicious code are fragmented: they mix requests for executable software with requests for harmful security knowledge and report refusal rates over non-comparable corpora. This paper's central result is that the CODE-versus-KNOWLEDGE classification axis established in a prior four-corpus release remains stable under a substantially expanded corpus pool and an independently refreshed judge panel, evidence that it measures a real construct rather than an artifact of the prompts or judges. Eight corpora spanning diverse elicitation paradigms (direct, jailbreak-decorated, indirect, and agent/interpreter: ASTRA, CySecBench, AdvBench/harmful_behaviors, JailbreakBench, MalwareBench, RedCode, RMCBench, Scam2Prompt) are classified under a five-judge consensus protocol (6,675 prompts x 5 judges = 33,375 calls), reaching Fleiss' kappa = 0.767 [95% CI 0.755, 0.777] ("substantial"). Critically, the panel shares no judge with the prior release (five paid commercial APIs replaced by five open-weight models from five vendors), yet the two panels agree on 94.45% of the 3,133 shared prompts and reach Cohen's kappa = 0.952 [0.942, 0.963] on the 3,031-prompt binary overlap: the axis survives near-total panel replacement. The released bank comprises 4,748 consensus-CODE and 1,923 consensus-KNOWLEDGE prompts, a reliability-quantified benchmark whose central classification axis is shown stable across corpus expansion and judge-panel replacement.

cs.CR

Refusal Evaluation in Coding LLMs and Code Agents: A Systematic Review of Thirteen Malicious-Code Prompt Corpora (2023-2025)

The evaluation of large language model refusal on malicious-coding tasks now spans at least thirteen publicly released prompt corpora (AdvBench, the CyberSecEval family, RMCBench, RedCode, MCGMark, JailbreakBench, CySecBench, MalwareBench, CIRCLE, MOCHA, ASTRA, Scam2Prompt / Innoc2Scam-bench, and JAWS-Bench), each constructed under a different protocol, released under different licensing terms, and validated (or not) against different inter-rater reliability standards. Existing surveys treat code security, jailbreak taxonomy, or vulnerability detection as the central object and mention these corpora only in passing. This paper reverses that framing: it treats the prompt datasets themselves as the unit of analysis. Following a PRISMA-style protocol, we specify a search strategy, screen the recent literature on coding-LLM refusal evaluation, apply a uniform extraction template to each in-scope corpus, and synthesize the resulting catalogue along construction methodology, prompt-construction taxonomy (modality, turn structure, elicitation style), reproducibility and licensing, and malware-category coverage. The synthesis surfaces three recurring methodological gaps: the absence of human-annotator baselines against which LLM-judge labels can be calibrated, the absence of cross-corpus comparability with refusal-rate statistics measuring non-equivalent constructs, and the fragmentation of malware-category taxonomies, with no canonical schema spanning the thirteen in-scope corpora. The review concludes with proposed methodological directions for next-generation corpora, including pre-registration of inclusion criteria, vendor-diverse multi-judge validation, Fleiss' kappa with bootstrap CI as the reliability baseline, and a candidate canonical taxonomy.

cs.CR

A Validated Prompt Bank for Malicious Code Generation: Separating Executable Weapons from Security Knowledge in 1,554 Consensus-Labeled Prompts

Existing benchmarks of language-model refusal on malicious-coding tasks routinely conflate requests for executable malicious software with requests for harmful security knowledge. This conflation matters because the two request types plausibly trigger distinct refusal pathways in safety-aligned language models, and a single refusal-rate statistic computed over a mixture cannot isolate either. This paper introduces a weapons-versus-knowledge classification axis, operationalized through a five-model consensus protocol, and applies it to 3,133 prompts drawn from four public benchmarks, yielding a 1,554-prompt consensus-CODE bank (the primary released artifact) and a 388-prompt consensus-KNOWLEDGE comparison set used by the companion benchmark paper. The consensus pipeline uses five large-language-model judges spanning four vendor families (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Zhipu AI, Alibaba), each issuing a binary CODE/KNOWLEDGE label per prompt under a three-of-five majority rule, with inter-rater reliability quantified by Fleiss' kappa with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. Across all 3,133 prompts the five judges achieve kappa = 0.876 [95% CI: 0.862, 0.888], "almost perfect" agreement by the Landis & Koch convention, with 69.3% of prompts unanimous at five-of-five; all 3,133 prompts reached the 3-of-5 threshold, so the consensus pipeline produced zero ambiguity-excluded prompts. Whether the axis separates model behavior in practice is an empirical question this paper leaves to the companion benchmark study; the present contribution is the reliability-documented artifact and the case for treating the weapons-versus-knowledge distinction as the organizing axis of code-safety evaluation.

cs.CR

The Signalgate Case is Waiving a Red Flag to All Organizational and Behavioral Cybersecurity Leaders, Practitioners, and Researchers: Are We Receiving the Signal Amidst the Noise?

The Signalgate incident of March 2025, wherein senior US national security officials inadvertently disclosed sensitive military operational details via the encrypted messaging platform Signal, highlights critical vulnerabilities in organizational security arising from human error, governance gaps, and the misuse of technology. Although smaller in scale when compared to historical breaches involving billions of records, Signalgate illustrates critical systemic issues often overshadowed by a focus on external cyber threats. Employing a case-study approach and systematic review grounded in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, we analyze the incident to identify patterns of human-centric vulnerabilities and governance challenges common to organizational security failures. Findings emphasize three critical points. (1) Organizational security depends heavily on human behavior, with internal actors often serving as the weakest link despite advanced technical defenses; (2) Leadership tone strongly influences organizational security culture and efficacy, and (3) widespread reliance on technical solutions without sufficient investments in human and organizational factors leads to ineffective practices and wasted resources. From these observations, we propose actionable recommendations for enhancing organizational and national security, including strong leadership engagement, comprehensive adoption of zero-trust architectures, clearer accountability structures, incentivized security behaviors, and rigorous oversight. Particularly during periods of organizational transition, such as mergers or large-scale personnel changes, additional measures become particularly important. Signalgate underscores the need for leaders and policymakers to reorient cybersecurity strategies toward addressing governance, cultural, and behavioral risks.

cs.CR