arXiv subjects

Sven Krasser

Publications and source records attributed to Sven Krasser.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Cybersecurity Detection Classification with Reasoning-enabled Language Models

A major issue in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) is alert fatigue, as the number of detections reported is more than staff can triage in a given day. Prior work prompts or fine-tunes large language models (LLMs) to emit a triage label directly, but does not train them to reason about whether a detection is a genuine threat. We train a chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning-enabled triage classifier on real, human-labeled Windows endpoint detections by combining automated prompt optimization, self-training, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. We find that CoT reasoning also degrades the label-token probabilities that automated triage relies on, so we separately train a calibrator that reads the full reasoning trace and estimates the probability that the verdict is correct. Our system reaches 82.6% test accuracy and, at the high-confidence operating point that governs automated triage, improves benign recall by 43.0% and malicious recall by 18.3% over a direct-label LLM classifier. We further show that the trained calibrator is necessary - an untrained confidence judge collapses high-confidence recall to zero - and that a finetuned 30B model significantly outperforms frontier general-purpose models, motivating targeted training over scale.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Cybersecurity is the True Frontier for Generative AI Success or Failure

Cybersecurity is a real-life test-bed for many machine learning problems at once, especially when considering modern strides in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate processes as ``agents.'' Cybersecurity workflows require orchestrating hundreds of standard and bespoke tools through various formats. The scale of cybersecurity data is enormous; for example, a single malware sample can be viewed as a sequence of billions of tokens. The cost of labeling any file by experts is enormous and labor-intensive, in part because an adversary (possibly a well-funded nation state actor) is attempting to subvert your detection methods. Even skilled experts may disagree on the correct label, creating ambiguity in what constitutes ground truth. When deployed, models must run quickly on billions of items a day, where low-latency is critical for operational success, in a continuously changing environment. In addition, explainability is not optional: analysts demand clear reasoning for model decisions to cope with the large number of false-positive alerts they face daily, and to quickly develop remediation and understand how something went wrong. In short, the amount of complexity cybersecurity is greater than that of natural language and computer vision, and thus we posit that cybersecurity is the better test-case for general AI progress than other, well-studied fields.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

CyberSOCEval: Benchmarking LLMs Capabilities for Malware Analysis and Threat Intelligence Reasoning

Today's cyber defenders are overwhelmed by a deluge of security alerts, threat intelligence signals, and shifting business context, creating an urgent need for AI systems to enhance operational security work. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate and scale Security Operations Center (SOC) operations, existing evaluations do not fully assess the scenarios most relevant to real-world defenders. This lack of informed evaluation impacts both AI developers and those applying LLMs to SOC automation. Without clear insight into LLM performance in real-world security scenarios, developers lack a north star for development, and users cannot reliably select the most effective models. Meanwhile, malicious actors are using AI to scale cyber attacks, highlighting the need for open source benchmarks to drive adoption and community-driven improvement among defenders and model developers. To address this, we introduce CyberSOCEval, a new suite of open source benchmarks within CyberSecEval 4. CyberSOCEval includes benchmarks tailored to evaluate LLMs in two tasks: Malware Analysis and Threat Intelligence Reasoning--core defensive domains with inadequate coverage in current benchmarks. Our evaluations show that larger, more modern LLMs tend to perform better, confirming the training scaling laws paradigm. We also find that reasoning models leveraging test time scaling do not achieve the same boost as in coding and math, suggesting these models have not been trained to reason about cybersecurity analysis, and pointing to a key opportunity for improvement. Finally, current LLMs are far from saturating our evaluations, showing that CyberSOCEval presents a significant challenge for AI developers to improve cyber defense capabilities.

cs.CR↗