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Vadim Okun

Publications and source records attributed to Vadim Okun.

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CyberForge: Verified Vulnerability Injection at Repository Level for Cybersecurity Agent Training

Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software. Generally available agents can already aid attackers, who only need to find one exploitable weakness, while defenders must continuously identify and patch all vulnerabilities across fast-growing codebases. Stronger defensive agents would help close this gap, yet the scarcity of security training data with reproducible build and execution environments remains a bottleneck. We present CyberForge, a framework that synthesizes executable, repository-level security training data by injecting vulnerabilities into real C/C++ projects. It validates each instance dynamically: the injected build must pass the project's unit tests, and generated proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) must trigger on the injected build and not on the clean one. CyberForge is not limited by the availability of disclosed vulnerabilities, therefore it can scale in comparison to data augmentation techniques which rely on historic CVE data. The resulting corpus holds 1034 validated vulnerabilities across 80 projects and 63 weakness categories, with edit locality similar to real CVE patches under a real-versus-real noise floor. Fine-tuning on trajectories collected over this corpus improves SEC-bench patch repair by +3.3 to +14.7 points, in all six configurations of three model scales and two teachers, with the 31B student reaching its GPT-5.4-mini teacher, 72.7% against 74.0%. These gains generalize out of distribution to PatchEval, a corpus containing other programming languages, where every configuration also improves and the 31B student passes its teacher.

cs.CR

Software Vulnerability Detection Using a Lightweight Graph Neural Network

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a popular choice in vulnerability detection studies given their foundational capabilities, open source availability, and variety of models, but have limited scalability due to extensive compute requirements. Using the natural graph relational structure of code, we show that our proposed graph neural network (GNN) based deep learning model VulGNN for vulnerability detection can achieve performance almost on par with LLMs, but is 100 times smaller in size and fast to retrain and customize. We describe the VulGNN architecture, ablation studies on components, learning rates, and generalizability to different code datasets. As a lightweight model for vulnerability analysis, VulGNN is efficient and deployable at the edge as part of real-world software development pipelines.

cs.SE

AVIATOR: Towards AI-Agentic Vulnerability Injection Workflow for High-Fidelity, Large-Scale Code Security Dataset

The increasing complexity of software systems and the sophistication of cyber-attacks have underscored the need for reliable automated software vulnerability detection. Data-driven approaches using deep learning models show promise but critically depend on the availability of large, accurately labeled datasets. Yet existing datasets either suffer from noisy labels, limited vulnerability coverage, or fail to reflect vulnerabilities as they occur in real-world software. This also limits large-scale benchmarking of such solutions. Automated vulnerability injection provides a way to address these limitations, but existing techniques remain limited in coverage, contextual fidelity, or injection success. In this paper, we present AVIATOR, the first AI-agentic vulnerability injection framework. AVIATOR decomposes vulnerability injection into a coordinated workflow of specialized AI agents, tool-based analysis, and iterative self-correction, explicitly mirroring expert reasoning. It integrates RAG and lightweight LoRA-based fine-tuning to produce realistic, category-specific vulnerabilities without relying on handcrafted patterns. Across three benchmarks, AVIATOR achieves high injection fidelity (91-95%) surpassing existing injection techniques in both accuracy and vulnerability coverage. When used for data augmentation to train deep learning-based vulnerability detection (DLVD) models, AVIATOR provides the strongest downstream gains in vulnerability detection. Across models and base datasets, AVIATOR improves average F1 scores by +22% over no augmentation, +25% over VGX, holding the prior best injection success rate, and +3% over VulScribeR, the prior state-of-the-art LLM-based injection model, with +7% higher recall and no precision loss. Its augmented data exhibits the lowest distributional distortion and scales efficiently with <2% syntax rejection at 4.3x lower cost than VulScribeR.

cs.CR

Guidelines on Minimum Standards for Developer Verification of Software

Executive Order (EO) 14028, "Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity", 12 May 2021, directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to recommend minimum standards for software testing within 60 days. This document describes eleven recommendations for software verification techniques as well as providing supplemental information about the techniques and references for further information. It recommends the following techniques: Threat modeling to look for design-level security issues Automated testing for consistency and to minimize human effort Static code scanning to look for top bugs Heuristic tools to look for possible hardcoded secrets Use of built-in checks and protections "Black box" test cases Code-based structural test cases Historical test cases Fuzzing Web app scanners, if applicable Address included code (libraries, packages, services) The document does not address the totality of software verification, but instead, recommends techniques that are broadly applicable and form the minimum standards. The document was developed by NIST in consultation with the National Security Agency (NSA). Additionally, we received input from numerous outside organizations through papers submitted to a NIST workshop on the Executive Order held in early June 2021, discussion at the workshop, as well as follow up with several of the submitters.

cs.SE