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Shipei Qu

Publications and source records attributed to Shipei Qu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

DoGNAVY-Exploit: Harnessing Parallel Open-Weight Agents for Stage-Aware Vulnerability Exploitation

Frontier LLM agents can turn known vulnerabilities into working exploits, but are costly and often access-restricted due to their potential for malicious use. Open-weight models offer a more accessible alternative, but struggle to maintain progress across long exploitation chains. They also often fail to apply relevant security knowledge at the appropriate stage and in the right context to identify and evaluate promising attack directions. To address these limitations, we propose DoGNAVY-Exploit, a multi-agent harness built around two complementary designs: stage-aware decomposition with progressive expert knowledge disclosure, and hierarchical orchestration with parallel exploration. Specifically, DoGNAVY-Exploit uses configurable milestones to recast long-horizon exploitation as short, verifiable capability transitions and provides only the knowledge relevant to each stage. Within each milestone, a hierarchical architecture separates strategic planning from parallel execution: a planner proposes diverse attack routes, executors test them concurrently, and a controller accepts progress only when supported by runtime evidence. A shared structured memory consolidates verified facts, artifacts, replay steps, and failed routes across branches, allowing agents to build on collective progress and carry validated knowledge into subsequent milestones. In controlled benchmark environments, DoGNAVY-Exploit with GLM-5.2 achieves 97.5% Pass@1 on Cybench, and 97.5% zero-day and 100% one-day Pass@1 on CVE-Bench. On ExploitGym, it solves 79 tasks with GLM-5.2 and 157 with GLM-5.3, while the corresponding public Claude Code baselines solve 39 and 130 tasks, respectively. Ablation results further demonstrate that the stage-aware orchestration, expert knowledge, parallel exploration, and memory designs can substantially improve the exploitation capabilities of open-weight agents.

cs.AI↗

Now Let's Make It Physical: Enabling Physically Trusted Certificate Issuance for Keyless Security in CAs

The signing key protection of Certificate Authorities (CAs) remains a critical challenge in PKI. Traditional approaches struggle to eliminate the risk of key exposure due to those (un)intentional human errors. This long-standing dilemma motivates us to propose Armored Core, a novel PKI security extension using the trusted binding of Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) for CAs. PUFs leverage manufacturing variations to generate unique and random responses. Combining with XOR and hash, they can make key exposure impossible for CAs through keyless certificate issuance. In Armored Core, we design a set of PUF-based X.509v3 certificate functions for CAs to generate physically trusted "signatures" without using a digital key. Moreover, we introduce a novel PUF transparency mechanism to effectively monitor the PUF operations in CAs. We integrate Armored Core into real-world PKI systems including Let's Encrypt Pebble and Certbot. We also provide a PUF-embedded hardware prototype. The evaluation results show that Armored Core can achieve keyless certificate issuance while improving the computation performance by 4.9%~73.7%. It only incurs small communication and storage overhead (<4%).

cs.CR↗

Teamwork Makes TEE Work: Open and Resilient Remote Attestation on Decentralized Trust

Remote Attestation (RA) enables the integrity and authenticity of applications in Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to be verified. Existing TEE RA designs employ a centralized trust model where they rely on a single provisioned secret key and a centralized verifier to establish trust for remote parties. This model is however brittle and can be untrusted under advanced attacks nowadays. Besides, most designs only have fixed procedures once deployed, making them hard to adapt to different emerging situations and provide resilient functionalities. Therefore, we propose JANUS, an open and resilient TEE RA scheme. To decentralize trust, we, on one hand, introduce Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) as an intrinsic root of trust (RoT) in TEE to directly provide physical trusted measurements. On the other hand, we design novel decentralized verification functions on smart contract with result audits and RA session snapshot. Furthermore, we design an automated switch mechanism that allows JANUS to remain resilient and offer flexible RA services under various situations. We provide a UC-based security proof and demonstrate the scalability and generality of JANUS by implementing an complete prototype.

cs.CR↗

Abusing Processor Exception for General Binary Instrumentation on Bare-metal Embedded Devices

Analyzing the security of closed-source drivers and libraries in embedded systems holds significant importance, given their fundamental role in the supply chain. Unlike x86, embedded platforms lack comprehensive binary manipulating tools, making it difficult for researchers and developers to effectively detect and patch security issues in such closed-source components. Existing works either depend on full-fledged operating system features or suffer from tedious corner cases, restricting their application to bare-metal firmware prevalent in embedded environments. In this paper, we present PIFER (Practical Instrumenting Framework for Embedded fiRmware) that enables general and fine-grained static binary instrumentation for embedded bare-metal firmware. By abusing the built-in hardware exception-handling mechanism of the embedded processors, PIFER can perform instrumentation on arbitrary target addresses. Additionally, We propose an instruction translation-based scheme to guarantee the correct execution of the original firmware after patching. We evaluate PIFER against real-world, complex firmware, including Zephyr RTOS, CoreMark benchmark, and a close-sourced commercial product. The results indicate that PIFER correctly instrumented 98.9% of the instructions. Further, a comprehensive performance evaluation was conducted, demonstrating the practicality and efficiency of our work.

cs.CR↗