arXiv subjects

Paul Attie

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Attie.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Squish and Release: Exposing Hidden Hallucinations by Making Them Surface as Safety Signals

Language models detect false premises when asked directly but absorb them under conversational pressure, producing authoritative professional output built on errors they already identified. This failure - order-gap hallucination - is invisible to output inspection because the error migrates into the activation space of the safety circuit, suppressed but not erased. We introduce Squish and Release (S&R), an activation-patching architecture with two components: a fixed detector body (layers 24-31, the localized safety evaluation circuit) and a swappable detector core (an activation vector controlling perception direction). A safety core shifts the model from compliance toward detection; an absorb core reverses it. We evaluate on OLMo-2 7B using the Order-Gap Benchmark - 500 chains across 500 domains, all manually graded. Key findings: cascade collapse is near-total (99.8% compliance at O5); the detector body is binary and localized (layers 24-31 shift 93.6%, layers 0-23 contribute zero, p<10^-189); a synthetically engineered core releases 76.6% of collapsed chains; detection is the more stable attractor (83% restore vs 58% suppress); and epistemic specificity is confirmed (false-premise core releases 45.4%, true-premise core releases 0.0%). The contribution is the framework - body/core architecture, benchmark, and core engineering methodology - which is model-agnostic by design.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Bypassing Array Canaries via Autonomous Function Call Resolution

We observed the Array Canary, a novel JavaScript anti-analysis technique currently exploited in-the-wild by the Phishing-as-a-Service framework Darcula. The Array Canary appears to be an advanced form of the array shuffling techniques employed by the Emotet JavaScript downloader. In practice, a series of Array Canaries are set within a string array and if modified will cause the program to endlessly loop. In this paper, we demonstrate how an Array Canary works and discuss Autonomous Function Call Resolution (AFCR), which is a method we created to bypass Array Canaries. We also introduce Arphsy, a proof-of-concept for AFCR designed to guide Large Language Models and security researchers in the deobfuscation of "canaried" JavaScript code. We accomplish this by (i) Finding and extracting all Immediately Invoked Function Expressions from a canaried file, (ii) parsing the file's Abstract Syntax Tree for any function that does not implement imported function calls, (iii) identifying the most reassigned variable and its corresponding function body, (iv) calculating the length of the largest string array and uses it to determine the offset values within the canaried file, (v) aggregating all the previously identified functions into a single file, and (vi) appending driver code into the verified file and using it to deobfuscate the canaried file.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Code Documentation and Analysis to Secure Software Development

We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the corresponding code is also changed. That is, comments are linked and updated so as to remain internally consistent and also consistent with the code. By flagging "out of date" comments, CoDAT alerts the developer to maintain up-to-date documentation. We use a large language model to check the semantic consistency between a fragment of code and the comments that describe it. Thus we also flag semantic inconsistency as well as out of date comments. This helps programers write code that correctly implements a code sketch, and so provides machine support for a step-wise refinement approach, starting with a code sketch and proceeding down to code through one or more refinement iterations. CoDAT is implemented in the Intellij IDEA IDE where we use the Code Insight daemon package alongside a custom regular expression algorithm to mark tagged comments whose corresponding code blocks have changed. CoDAT's backend is structurally decentralized to allow a distributed ledger framework for code consistency and architectural compilation tracking.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Model Repair via Symmetry

The symmetry of a Kripke structure $\mathcal{M}$ has been exploited to replace a model check of $\mathcal{M}$ by a model check of the potentially smaller structure $\mathcal{N}$ obtained as the quotient of $\mathcal{M}$ by its symmetry group $G$. We extend previous work to model repair: identify a substructure that satisfies a given temporal logic formula. We show that the substructures of $\mathcal{M}$ that are preserved by $G$ form a lattice that maps to the substructure lattice of $\mathcal{N}$. We also show the existence of a monotone Galois connection between the lattice of substructures of $\mathcal{N}$ and the lattice of substructures of $\mathcal{M}$ that are "maximal" w.r.t. an appropriately defined group action of $G$ on $\mathcal{M}$. These results enable us to repair $\mathcal{N}$ and then to lift the repair to $\mathcal{M}$. We can thus repair symmetric finite-state concurrent programs by repairing the corresponding $\mathcal{N}$, thereby effecting program repair while avoiding state-explosion.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2019

From Global Choreographies to Provably Correct and Efficient Distributed Implementations

We define a method to automatically synthesize provably-correct efficient distributed implementations from high-level global choreographies. A global choreography describes the execution and communication logic between a set of provided processes which are described by their interfaces. The operations at the level of choreographies include multiparty communications, choice, loop, and branching. Choreographies are master-triggered, that is each choreography has one master to trigger its execution. This allows to automatically generate conflict free distributed implementations without controllers. The behavior of the synthesized implementations follows the behavior of choreographies. In addition, the absence of controllers ensures the efficiency of the implementation and reduces the communication needed at runtime. Moreover, we define a translation of the distributed implementations to equivalent Promela versions. The translation allows verifying the distributed system against behavioral properties. We implemented a Java prototype to validate the approach and applied it to automatically synthesize micro-services architectures. We illustrate our method on the automatic synthesis of a verified distributed buying system.

cs.DC↗