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Md Nafiu Rahman

Publications and source records attributed to Md Nafiu Rahman.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

From Codebases to LLMs: Non-Inclusive Naming in Linux Foundation Repositories

Since 2020, the Linux Foundation and the multi-organization Inclusive Naming Initiative (INI) have encouraged open-source projects to replace non-inclusive terms such as master/slave and whitelist/blacklist. Although these recommendations have been widely adopted, there is limited empirical evidence on their long-term adoption across Linux Foundation (LF) projects or their implications for AI-assisted software development. In this paper, we present NISCAN, a multilingual static-analysis framework that detects non-inclusive terminology across source code and related software artifacts using the INI vocabulary. Using NISCAN, we conduct the first ecosystem-scale study of inclusive naming across 461 Linux Foundation repositories. Our analysis shows that non-inclusive terminology has declined by approximately 47% since 2020, yet adoption remains incomplete: 62.7% of repositories still contain at least one Tier-1 non-inclusive identifier, while most remaining terminology resides outside source code in documentation, comments, configuration files, and other software artifacts. We further show that repository size, programming language, project functionality, and ecosystem are stronger predictors of term inclusiveness in LF repositories rather than foundation governance. To examine the implications for AI-assisted software development, we conduct a case study evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) can reconstruct legacy non-inclusive identifiers from surrounding program context. The results show that historical naming decisions remain embedded in model predictions even after identifiers have been renamed. Overall, our study findings provide the first ecosystem-scale assessment of inclusive naming adoption within the Linux Foundation and highlight the importance of addressing terminology residue to support responsible naming and ethically sourced code generation.

cs.SE

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

cs.CL

Secret Leak Detection in Software Issue Reports using LLMs: A Comprehensive Evaluation

In the digital era, accidental exposure of sensitive information such as API keys, tokens, and credentials is a growing security threat. While most prior work focuses on detecting secrets in source code, leakage in software issue reports remains largely unexplored. This study fills that gap through a large-scale analysis and a practical detection pipeline for exposed secrets in GitHub issues. Our pipeline combines regular expression-based extraction with large language model (LLM)-based contextual classification to detect real secrets and reduce false positives. We build a benchmark of 54,148 instances from public GitHub issues, including 5,881 manually verified true secrets. Using this dataset, we evaluate entropy-based baselines and keyword heuristics used by prior secret detection tools, classical machine learning, deep learning, and LLM-based methods. Regex and entropy based approaches achieve high recall but poor precision, while smaller models such as RoBERTa and CodeBERT greatly improve performance (F1 = 92.70%). Proprietary models like GPT-4o perform moderately in few-shot settings (F1 = 80.13%), and fine-tuned open-source larger LLMs such as Qwen and LLaMA reach up to 94.49% F1. Finally, we also validate our approach on 178 real-world GitHub repositories, achieving an F1-score of 81.6% which demonstrates our approach's strong ability to generalize to in-the-wild scenarios.

cs.SE

IssueGuard: Real-Time Secret Leak Prevention Tool for GitHub Issue Reports

GitHub and GitLab are widely used collaborative platforms whose issue-tracking systems contain large volumes of unstructured text, including logs, code snippets, and configuration examples. This creates a significant risk of accidental secret exposure, such as API keys and credentials, yet these platforms provide no mechanism to warn users before submission. We present \textsc{IssueGuard}, a tool for real-time detection and prevention of secret leaks in issue reports. Implemented as a Chrome extension, \textsc{IssueGuard} analyzes text as users type and combines regex-based candidate extraction with a fine-tuned CodeBERT model for contextual classification. This approach effectively separates real secrets from false positives and achieves an F1-score of 92.70\% on a benchmark dataset, outperforming traditional regex-based scanners. \textsc{IssueGuard} integrates directly into the web interface and continuously analyzes the issue editor, presenting clear visual warnings to help users avoid submitting sensitive data. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/disa-lab/IssueGuard}{https://github.com/disa-lab/IssueGuard} , and a demonstration video is available at \href{https://youtu.be/kvbWA8rr9cU}{https://youtu.be/kvbWA8rr9cU} .

cs.CR

BanglaForge: LLM Collaboration with Self-Refinement for Bangla Code Generation

Bangla is a low-resource language for code generation, lacking large-scale annotated datasets and tools to transform natural language specifications into executable programs. This makes Bangla-to-code generation a challenging task requiring innovative solutions. To address this, we introduce BanglaForge, a novel framework for generating code from Bangla function descriptions. BanglaForge leverages a retrieval-augmented dual-model collaboration paradigm with self-refinement, combining in-context learning, llm-based translation, systematic prompt engineering, and iterative self-refinement based on execution feedback, where a coder generates initial solutions and a reviewer enhances them for robustness. On the BLP-2025 Bangla Code Generation benchmark, BanglaForge achieves a competitive Pass@1 accuracy of 84.00%, demonstrating the effectiveness of retrieval, model collaboration, and self-refinement for low-resource Bangla code generation.

cs.SE

EVCC: Enhanced Vision Transformer-ConvNeXt-CoAtNet Fusion for Classification

Hybrid vision architectures combining Transformers and CNNs have significantly advanced image classification, but they usually do so at significant computational cost. We introduce EVCC (Enhanced Vision Transformer-ConvNeXt-CoAtNet), a novel multi-branch architecture integrating the Vision Transformer, lightweight ConvNeXt, and CoAtNet through key innovations: (1) adaptive token pruning with information preservation, (2) gated bidirectional cross-attention for enhanced feature refinement, (3) auxiliary classification heads for multi-task learning, and (4) a dynamic router gate employing context-aware confidence-driven weighting. Experiments across the CIFAR-100, Tobacco3482, CelebA, and Brain Cancer datasets demonstrate EVCC's superiority over powerful models like DeiT-Base, MaxViT-Base, and CrossViT-Base by consistently achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with improvements of up to 2 percentage points, while reducing FLOPs by 25 to 35%. Our adaptive architecture adjusts computational demands to deployment needs by dynamically reducing token count, efficiently balancing the accuracy-efficiency trade-off while combining global context, local details, and hierarchical features for real-world applications. The source code of our implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EVCC.

cs.CV

BrainRotViT: Transformer-ResNet Hybrid for Explainable Modeling of Brain Aging from 3D sMRI

Accurate brain age estimation from structural MRI is a valuable biomarker for studying aging and neurodegeneration. Traditional regression and CNN-based methods face limitations such as manual feature engineering, limited receptive fields, and overfitting on heterogeneous data. Pure transformer models, while effective, require large datasets and high computational cost. We propose Brain ResNet over trained Vision Transformer (BrainRotViT), a hybrid architecture that combines the global context modeling of vision transformers (ViT) with the local refinement of residual CNNs. A ViT encoder is first trained on an auxiliary age and sex classification task to learn slice-level features. The frozen encoder is then applied to all sagittal slices to generate a 2D matrix of embedding vectors, which is fed into a residual CNN regressor that incorporates subject sex at the final fully-connected layer to estimate continuous brain age. Our method achieves an MAE of 3.34 years (Pearson $r=0.98$, Spearman $ρ=0.97$, $R^2=0.95$) on validation across 11 MRI datasets encompassing more than 130 acquisition sites, outperforming baseline and state-of-the-art models. It also generalizes well across 4 independent cohorts with MAEs between 3.77 and 5.04 years. Analyses on the brain age gap (the difference between the predicted age and actual age) show that aging patterns are associated with Alzheimer's disease, cognitive impairment, and autism spectrum disorder. Model attention maps highlight aging-associated regions of the brain, notably the cerebellar vermis, precentral and postcentral gyri, temporal lobes, and medial superior frontal gyrus. Our results demonstrate that this method provides an efficient, interpretable, and generalizable framework for brain-age prediction, bridging the gap between CNN- and transformer-based approaches while opening new avenues for aging and neurodegeneration research.

cs.CV

Secret Breach Detection in Source Code with Large Language Models

Background: Leaking sensitive information - such as API keys, tokens, and credentials - in source code remains a persistent security threat. Traditional regex and entropy-based tools often generate high false positives due to limited contextual understanding. Aims: This work aims to enhance secret detection in source code using large language models (LLMs), reducing false positives while maintaining high recall. We also evaluate the feasibility of using fine-tuned, smaller models for local deployment. Method: We propose a hybrid approach combining regex-based candidate extraction with LLM-based classification. We evaluate pre-trained and fine-tuned variants of various Large Language Models on a benchmark dataset from 818 GitHub repositories. Various prompting strategies and efficient fine-tuning methods are employed for both binary and multiclass classification. Results: The fine-tuned LLaMA-3.1 8B model achieved an F1-score of 0.9852 in binary classification, outperforming regex-only baselines. For multiclass classification, Mistral-7B reached 0.982 accuracy. Fine-tuning significantly improved performance across all models. Conclusions: Fine-tuned LLMs offer an effective and scalable solution for secret detection, greatly reducing false positives. Open-source models provide a practical alternative to commercial APIs, enabling secure and cost-efficient deployment in development workflows.

cs.SE