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Soohyeon Choi

Publications and source records attributed to Soohyeon Choi.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-Channel Spread-Spectrum Code Watermarking

Attributing code to the large language model that produced it is essential for provenance, licensing, and misuse accountability, yet no deployed watermark meets this need. Generation-time schemes require access to the producing model and cannot be applied to third-party code, while post-hoc schemes work on any code but carry at most 4 bits of payload, far too few to distinguish the many deployed model configurations. We present multi-channel spread-spectrum watermarking, the first post-hoc, training-free code watermark with a 24-bit payload and formal robustness guarantees. The scheme encodes bits in variable naming conventions and in eight pairs of semantically equivalent code patterns, and a keyed pseudo-random permutation maps every site to a codeword bit so that each bit receives multiple independent votes. Majority voting absorbs distributed corruption, while an outer Reed-Solomon code recovers the identifier when concentrated channel attacks defeat the vote, yielding provable robustness bounds for formatting, syntactic, and structural attacks. Across 1,750 Python files from CodeNet and from GPT-4.1 and Llama-4 generations, the watermark achieves 100% clean-detection accuracy with zero false positives. Under 17 attack types, it recovers the identifier at 97.6% accuracy under 8 variable renames and 94.1% under 10% random per-site corruption, while the strongest post-hoc baseline collapses to 0% under any single-transform attack. Embedding and detection together take under 200 ms on CPU without training data or GPU.

cs.CR

Compositional Jailbreaking: An Empirical Analysis of Mutator Chain Interactions in Aligned LLMs

Jailbreaking attacks on large language models pose a significant threat to AI safety by enabling the generation of harmful or restricted content. While prior work has explored both handcrafted and automated jailbreak strategies, the potential for compositional interaction between simple attacks remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study of mutator chaining, in which weak jailbreak transformations are applied sequentially to characterize how they interact: whether they reinforce one another, interfere destructively, or produce no meaningful change. We implement twelve baseline mutators and evaluate all ordered pairs on a benchmark of harmful prompts against three popular LLM models. Our framework introduces metrics for completeness and validity that capture both transformation persistence and attack effectiveness. Results reveal that the interaction landscape is highly non-uniform, while most combinations fail to outperform individual mutators, exhibiting destructive interference or structural incompatibility, a small fraction produce synergistic effects that improve attack success rates. Equally important, the prevalent failure modes reveal structural properties of safety alignment that are not apparent from single-strategy evaluations. These findings highlight the nuanced dynamics of adversarial prompt composition and offer new insights for building more robust safety defenses.

cs.CR

Security and Quality in LLM-Generated Code: A Multi-Language, Multi-Model Analysis

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven code generation tools are increasingly used throughout the software development lifecycle to accelerate coding tasks. However, the security of AI-generated code using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored, with studies revealing various risks and weaknesses. This paper analyzes the security of code generated by LLMs across different programming languages. We introduce a dataset of 200 tasks grouped into six categories to evaluate the performance of LLMs in generating secure and maintainable code. Our research shows that while LLMs can automate code creation, their security effectiveness varies by language. Many models fail to utilize modern security features in recent compiler and toolkit updates, such as Java 17. Moreover, outdated methods are still commonly used, particularly in C++. This highlights the need for advancing LLMs to enhance security and quality while incorporating emerging best practices in programming languages.

cs.CR

A Comprehensive Analysis of Evolving Permission Usage in Android Apps: Trends, Threats, and Ecosystem Insights

The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper permission usage, there are still many cases of permission abuse. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the Android permission landscape, highlighting trends and patterns in permission requests across various applications from the Google Play Store. By distinguishing between benign and malicious applications, we uncover developers' evolving strategies, with malicious apps increasingly requesting fewer permissions to evade detection, while benign apps request more to enhance functionality. In addition to examining permission trends across years and app features such as advertisements, in-app purchases, content ratings, and app sizes, we leverage association rule mining using the FP-Growth algorithm. This allows us to uncover frequent permission combinations across the entire dataset, specific years, and 16 app genres. The analysis reveals significant differences in permission usage patterns, providing a deeper understanding of co-occurring permissions and their implications for user privacy and app functionality. By categorizing permissions into high-level semantic groups and examining their application across distinct app categories, this study offers a structured approach to analyzing the dynamics within the Android ecosystem. The findings emphasize the importance of continuous monitoring, user education, and regulatory oversight to address permission misuse effectively.

cs.CR

Evaluating the Vulnerability of ML-Based Ethereum Phishing Detectors to Single-Feature Adversarial Perturbations

This paper explores the vulnerability of machine learning models to simple single-feature adversarial attacks in the context of Ethereum fraudulent transaction detection. Through comprehensive experimentation, we investigate the impact of various adversarial attack strategies on model performance metrics. Our findings, highlighting how prone those techniques are to simple attacks, are alarming, and the inconsistency in the attacks' effect on different algorithms promises ways for attack mitigation. We examine the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies, including adversarial training and enhanced feature selection, in enhancing model robustness and show their effectiveness.

cs.CR

Fishing for Phishers: Learning-Based Phishing Detection in Ethereum Transactions

Phishing detection on Ethereum has increasingly leveraged advanced machine learning techniques to identify fraudulent transactions. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the effectiveness of feature selection strategies and the role of graph-based models in enhancing detection accuracy. In this paper, we systematically examine these issues by analyzing and contrasting explicit transactional features and implicit graph-based features, both experimentally and analytically. We explore how different feature sets impact the performance of phishing detection models, particularly in the context of Ethereum's transactional network. Additionally, we address key challenges such as class imbalance and dataset composition and their influence on the robustness and precision of detection methods. Our findings demonstrate the advantages and limitations of each feature type, while also providing a clearer understanding of how feature affect model resilience and generalization in adversarial environments.

cs.CR

I Can Find You in Seconds! Leveraging Large Language Models for Code Authorship Attribution

Source code authorship attribution is important in software forensics, plagiarism detection, and protecting software patch integrity. Existing techniques often rely on supervised machine learning, which struggles with generalization across different programming languages and coding styles due to the need for large labeled datasets. Inspired by recent advances in natural language authorship analysis using large language models (LLMs), which have shown exceptional performance without task-specific tuning, this paper explores the use of LLMs for source code authorship attribution. We present a comprehensive study demonstrating that state-of-the-art LLMs can successfully attribute source code authorship across different languages. LLMs can determine whether two code snippets are written by the same author with zero-shot prompting, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.78, and can attribute code authorship from a small set of reference code snippets via few-shot learning, achieving MCC of 0.77. Additionally, LLMs show some adversarial robustness against misattribution attacks. Despite these capabilities, we found that naive prompting of LLMs does not scale well with a large number of authors due to input token limitations. To address this, we propose a tournament-style approach for large-scale attribution. Evaluating this approach on datasets of C++ (500 authors, 26,355 samples) and Java (686 authors, 55,267 samples) code from GitHub, we achieve classification accuracy of up to 65% for C++ and 68.7% for Java using only one reference per author. These results open new possibilities for applying LLMs to code authorship attribution in cybersecurity and software engineering.

cs.SE

Untargeted Code Authorship Evasion with Seq2Seq Transformation

Code authorship attribution is the problem of identifying authors of programming language codes through the stylistic features in their codes, a topic that recently witnessed significant interest with outstanding performance. In this work, we present SCAE, a code authorship obfuscation technique that leverages a Seq2Seq code transformer called StructCoder. SCAE customizes StructCoder, a system designed initially for function-level code translation from one language to another (e.g., Java to C#), using transfer learning. SCAE improved the efficiency at a slight accuracy degradation compared to existing work. We also reduced the processing time by about 68% while maintaining an 85% transformation success rate and up to 95.77% evasion success rate in the untargeted setting.

cs.CR

Robust Natural Language Processing: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent natural language processing (NLP) techniques have accomplished high performance on benchmark datasets, primarily due to the significant improvement in the performance of deep learning. The advances in the research community have led to great enhancements in state-of-the-art production systems for NLP tasks, such as virtual assistants, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis. However, such NLP systems still often fail when tested with adversarial attacks. The initial lack of robustness exposed troubling gaps in current models' language understanding capabilities, creating problems when NLP systems are deployed in real life. In this paper, we present a structured overview of NLP robustness research by summarizing the literature in a systemic way across various dimensions. We then take a deep-dive into the various dimensions of robustness, across techniques, metrics, embeddings, and benchmarks. Finally, we argue that robustness should be multi-dimensional, provide insights into current research, identify gaps in the literature to suggest directions worth pursuing to address these gaps.

cs.CL