Searcharxiv⌕ Search

SEARCH · Searcharxiv

Search Searcharxiv

Search indexed arXiv papers on artificial intelligence, large language models, computer vision and robotics. Read source abstracts and follow links to arXiv.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 451 records · Page 25Linked to original sources

Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Industrial Cybersecurity: A Review of Methods, Operational Integration, and Research Challenges

The increasing digitalization of industrial infrastructure and the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) have expanded the cyberattack surface of industrial systems. To address the growing complexity of cyber threats, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly deployed within industrial cybersecurity operations, particularly in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). While these approaches improve anomaly detection, threat analysis, and automated response, their opaque decision-making presents challenges for operational trust, regulatory compliance, and incident response. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the transparency and interpretability of AI-driven cybersecurity systems and decisions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of XAI techniques in industrial cybersecurity, focusing on industrial SOC environments and operational security workflows. We examine the role of AI in industrial SOC workflows, the types of operational data leveraged in industrial environments, and the benefits and limitations of AI-based threat detection. We then review major families of XAI approaches, including feature attribution methods, surrogate models, rule-based explanations, and visualization techniques, and analyze their applicability to industrial use cases. We further discuss the operational, regulatory, and safety requirements that distinguish industrial systems from traditional IT environments. Key challenges are examined, including limited labeled datasets, model reliability, explainability-performance tradeoffs, and the integration of XAI tools into SOC workflows. Finally, we identify open research directions and opportunities for developing trustworthy, operationally viable, and domain-specific XAI-enabled cybersecurity solutions for industrial environments.

cs.CR↗

DUPIN: Attack Learning Is Still Needed! Demonstrating Few-Shot after Unsupervised Pretraining Is A Nimble Forensics Learner

We propose a novel approach to learning-based attack forensics called DUPIN. DUPIN performs unsupervised pre-training on an enormous amount of audit events in the form of provenance graphs. It then proceeds to a few-shot learning stage, leveraging a small number of labeled attack examples to fine-tune its detection capabilities. We pretrain DUPIN on up to 38 - 52 days of audit logs (7.3TB total) and evaluate it against various baselines on 25 APT campaigns across four different data sources, facilitating the scalable evaluation.

cs.CR↗

Delegation Without Trust: An Empirical Gap Analysis of Identity, Authorization, and Runtime Governance in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Autonomous LLM agents increasingly act on a user's behalf: they hold credentials, call tools and services, and spawn sub-agents that act further on their behalf. This turns a long-standing distributed-systems question -- who is authorized to do what, on whose authority -- into an urgent and largely unsolved problem, because the component driving each agent is a language model an adversary can hijack. We argue that agent security must be evaluated under an untrusted-model assumption: a correct system is one in which a fully prompt-injected agent still cannot exceed the authority explicitly delegated to it. Against this standard we make three contributions. First, we give a threat model for multi-agent delegation centered on four adversaries -- confused deputy, token theft and replay, prompt-injection privilege escalation, and compromised sub-agents -- and derive eight security requirements a governed agent system must meet. Second, we show the gap is real: a default agent runtime modeling common practice (broad bearer credentials, authorization gated inside the model) fails all four threats, and across four widely used frameworks -- LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) authorization model -- three provide no built-in confinement and one only partial; no existing standard alone covers the requirement set. Third, we implement and adversarially evaluate an authorization broker that closes the gap. It blocks all four threats; it resists 11 direct attacks on its design and accepts 0 of 200,000 forged tokens; it confines a compromised sub-agent to its delegated task (a mean of 1.5 reachable actions versus all 8,100 under bearer delegation, across 2,000 randomized scenarios); and it enforces at microsecond cost (about 2.6 microseconds per decision), negligible against model inference. These principles are also realized in production in VotalAI's LLM Shield.

cs.CR↗

Workload Identification with Physical Side Channels for AI Governance

AI compute verification is one of the first tangible and tractable points for international policy aimed at AI governance. Determining whether frontier labs, or any operator, comply with agreements requires the regulating authority to discern how their compute is used. The elementary building block of AI compute is the GPU, and any activity it executes leaves a physical trace. Here, we show that an external observer can identify the class of the workload running on an NVIDIA H200 from its power draw. Unlike on-chip NVML telemetry, which can be spoofed or replayed, such a physical channel can in principle be observed independently of operator cooperation. We recorded $930$ five-second traces at $\sim 10$ MHz, covering seventeen open LLM families and twenty-five non-AI workloads. Over this corpus we separate training from inference and from non-AI computation with an accuracy of $97\%$ and a macro-averaged F1 score of $0.955$, evaluated on model families unseen during training. AI workload spectral content predominantly lies below $\sim 20$kHz and training is particularly recognizable through the memory-bound optimizer update. The GPU operator is then treated as adversarial and able to reshape the physical computation itself. Four evasion strategies are tested to disguise training as inference, producing an additional 680 adversarial traces. A detector hardened against evasion strategies, with the tested strategy held out, catches training $\geq 99\%$ of the time for three of the four strategies. The fourth, diluted low-rank adaptation (LoRA), is detected $48$--$88\%$ of the time with a hardened classifier, rising to $\geq 98\%$ with an additional rescue rule. While these attacks are not a comprehensive evaluation against adversarial behaviour, they offer initial insights beyond genuine activities and a dataset for developing and testing stronger evasion mechanisms.

cs.CR↗

OreProof: Verifiable Provenance with Limited Disclosure for Critical-Minerals Supply Chains Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Critical-minerals supply chains face a structural tension: regulators and buyers demand verifiable provenance, yet upstream actors are hesitant to disclose supplier identities, assay grades/yields, and prices that verification appears to require. We report a design science account of OreProof, a prototypical traceability platform addressing this verifiability-disclosure trade-off. Instantiated for gold, OreProof combines a hybrid on-chain/off-chain data model, Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs for selective disclosure, a Merkle-batched anchoring pipeline, and UNTP-aligned verifiable credentials on a public zkEVM testnet. Against a transparent baseline, directly inferable confidential attributes fell from three of four categories to none under a defined attacker model, while batched anchoring substantially improved throughput. Our contributions are the artifact prototype as well as four nascent design principles: prove over committed data rather than exposing it; credential only verifiable origin and flag unknown inputs for blended commodities; emit standards-aligned credentials from the outset; and partition disclosure by supply-chain role.

cs.CR↗

NeuroPriv: Adversarial Representation Learning for Privacy in Wearable EEG Systems

Wearable EEG systems may expose sensitive information beyond their intended health function, creating substantial risks to neuroprivacy. In this work, we show that commonly used EEG features can reveal participant identity and demographic attributes in addition to supporting the intended cognitive task. Wearable EEG is increasingly being explored for cognitive monitoring, neurological assessment, and longitudinal digital-health applications, yet many systems assume that transmitting compact spectral or spatial features instead of raw EEG provides sufficient privacy protection. Using EEGMAT as a motivating case study, we find that compact EEG features achieve a balanced accuracy of 0.788 for cognitive-state classification while enabling gender, age, and subject-identity inference with balanced accuracies of 0.858, 0.789, and 0.692, respectively. We further show that privacy-aware representation learning preserves task performance at 0.781 while reducing these inference accuracies to 0.563, 0.467, and 0.206. These findings motivate purpose-limited representations and explicit privacy auditing in wearable neurohealth systems.

cs.CR↗

Does Reasoning Mitigate Backdoor Attacks? A Neuro-Symbolic Perspective

Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI has recently emerged as a novel paradigm to enable trustworthy AI, aiming at integrating sub-symbolic neural perception with grounded symbolic reasoning. The neuro-symbolic integration process that characterizes these models has been proven beneficial to achieve more transparent, explainable and efficient AI systems. Meanwhile, their properties under adversarial settings have been overlooked being frequently deemed robust-by-design. However, the neural-symbolic integration process they leverage constitutes an additional layer of complexity that may provide an attack entry-point. Therefore, in this paper, we claim that an in-depth investigation of the adversarial robustness of NeSy models is necessary and provide the first systematic evaluation of backdoor attacks against NeSy. To this end, we compare the most popular NeSy framework, namely DeepProbLog, against baseline neural networks across a total of eight backdoor settings and four reasoning tasks. Our experimental results show that while NeSy models are indeed more robust than their neural counterpart on average, their robustness vastly depend on the strictness of the reasoning process being enforced and its compatibility with the chosen adversarial target. The source code to reproduce our experiments is made available at https://github.com/marcoantoniocorallo/NeSy-Backdoor.

cs.CR↗

TRIS: A Tri-Layer Retrieval Integrity Sieve Against Knowledge Poisoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical attack surface: PoisonedRAG shows that a handful of crafted passages can dominate dense retrieval and steer generation toward attacker-chosen answers. We present the Tri-Layer Sieve, a middleware defense that sanitizes retrieved evidence through cross-embedding-space clustering with an independent judge model, structural filtering of trigger-payload artifacts, and LLM consistency verification. The design exploits a key weakness of retrieval-stage poisoning: a single document must satisfy one embedding geometry, one internal Trigger-Payload structure, and one generation objective - rarely all three simultaneously, a fragility that persists even against an adaptive attacker who paraphrases around it. On Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MS-MARCO with Contriever retrieval (k=50), the Sieve reduces black-box Attack Success Rate from 67.0/87.0/64.0% to 3.0/14.0/4.0%, mitigates white-box HotFlip attacks from ~74% to 27.8% on NQ with Layer 3 enabled, and drives poisoned-document MRR to 0.000, while restoring clean accuracy from 13-33% under attack to 58-76%. Under an architecture-aware adversary who paraphrases triggers to evade the structural filter, enabling the consistency layer halves adaptive ASR (32.0% to 15.0% on NQ) while raising clean accuracy by 18 points, at an added latency of ~16-19 s/query under live retrieval.

cs.CL↗

EvoFlint: An Evolutionary Atlas of Multi-Turn LLM Vulnerabilities

Frontier language models that refuse harmful single-turn prompts often comply when the same intent is reached gradually over many turns, making multi-turn attacks one of the least understood failure modes of large language models. Most automated red-teaming methods treat this as a generation problem: produce attacks that break the model. We argue it is better framed as a search problem: discover, organize, and iteratively refine a diverse archive of attack strategies, producing a structured map of how a target model fails rather than a list of one-off successes. We introduce EvoFlint, which applies evolutionary quality-diversity search to multi-turn red-teaming. Attack strategies are phased conversation plans, not raw prompts, and are evolved through LLM-driven mutation and crossover. A Pareto fitness over attack success rate and peak severity preserves selection signal from near-miss attacks. A risk-indexed archive runs novelty search with local competition over strategy description embeddings inside each cell, maintaining diversity without committing to a predefined style taxonomy. A generation-level memory accumulates target-model insights across the population and feeds them back into strategy generation. On the HarmBench-test split, EvoFlint reaches attack success rates of 35.8% on Claude Sonnet 4.6, 59.7% on GPT-5.4, and 94.3% on Qwen3-32B, alongside 98.7% on the older GPT-4o included as a baseline reference. The resulting archive, organized by risk category, exposes for each target which categories of harm its safety training has and has not covered.

cs.CL↗

Context Inference Attacks Without Jailbreaks

Agentic AI systems are increasingly deployed to process sensitive data at inference time, such as healthcare records or financial documents assembled into a hidden \emph{context} before the system answers. Prior work has studied privacy risks primarily through \emph{jailbreaking} attacks that induce models to directly disclose sensitive content, but has largely overlooked the agentic setting where the context is assembled by the agent's own tool calls. We show that the agents we evaluate remain vulnerable to hidden-context leakage despite the controls we test against them, namely an instruction not to disclose the context, logit suppression, and context dilution. For instance, a web-browsing agent answering benign user queries still carries exploitable signals about records silently loaded into its context. We introduce and formalize \emph{context-inference attacks} through a security game and evaluate three settings under decreasing attacker knowledge and increasingly indirect delivery of the context: a known context, an unknown context, and a context the agent retrieves through its own tool calls. We distinguish a grey-box setting, in which the target model is used to score observations, from black-box settings in which the attacker scores with a surrogate it controls. We further characterize how leakage varies with query budget, context size, and target-model size. A single attack carries through all three settings without modification, reaching $100\%$ ASR on small candidate sets and $63\%$ at $1024$ candidates against a known context, $78.9$ AUROC when the template and surrounding records are unknown, $92.5$ AUROC when a 14B surrogate scores a 32B target, and $81.8$ AUROC when the records arrive as an agent's retrieval returns, against chance rates of $1/|\mathcal{Z}|$ and $50$ respectively.

cs.CR↗

A Public-Key-Dependent Adversarial-Deletion Ceiling for Fixed-Alphabet Multi-Bit Pseudorandom Codes

A pseudorandom code (PRC) is a keyed error-correcting code whose codewords are computationally indistinguishable from uniform strings. We study public-key PRCs over fixed alphabets against adversarial deletions, where the deletion channel may both depend on the public encoding key and the transmitted codeword. Let $γ_q^{\mathrm{LCS}}$ denote the asymptotic normalised longest-common-subsequence length of two independent uniform $q$-ary strings. We prove that for every fixed $q\ge2$ no multi-message public-key PRC with a single-output decoder is robust against all such $δ$-deletion channels for any $δ>1-γ_q^{\mathrm{LCS}}$. For $q=2$, the current rigorous bound $γ_2\ge0.792665992$ rules out every constant $δ>0.207334008$. The proof uses pseudorandomness only to transfer an LCS event from uniform strings to independently sampled codewords and therefore also the resulting collision argument is information-theoretic and requires no secret key. We also extend the argument to list decoding: for every fixed constant $L$, provided the message space contains at least $L+1$ messages, no such PRC with output lists of size at most $L$ is robust for $δ>1-γ_2^{(L+1)}$. Since $γ_2^{(m)}=1/2+Θ(1/\sqrt m)$, these thresholds approach $1/2$. Our bounds are specific to public-key-dependent adversarial channels and do not apply to oblivious edit channels.

cs.CR↗

VeriX-Anon: A Multi-Layered Framework for Mathematically Verifiable Outsourced Target-Driven Data Anonymization

Organisations increasingly outsource privacy-sensitive data transformations to cloud providers, yet no practical mechanism lets the data owner verify that the contracted algorithm was faithfully executed. VeriX-Anon is a multi-layered verification framework for outsourced Target-Driven k-anonymization combining three orthogonal mechanisms: deterministic verification via Merkle-style hashing of an Authenticated Decision Tree, probabilistic verification via Boundary Sentinels and exact-duplicate Twins with cryptographic identifiers, and utility-based verification via Explainable AI fingerprinting that compares SHAP value distributions before and after anonymization using the Wasserstein distance. Across seven cross-domain datasets and four cloud profiles (28 scenarios), against Lazy (drops records), Dumb (fake hash), and Approximate (valid hash) adversaries, VeriX-Anon detects 25 of 28 deviations under a fixed threshold and 27 of 28 once the threshold is calibrated per dataset, with no false alarms. No single layer achieved this alone. The XAI layer was the only mechanism that caught the Approximate adversary, succeeding on six of seven datasets and missing only a high-dimensional case where honest generalization shifts SHAP as much as the attack. Target-Driven anonymization preserved significantly more utility than blind splitting, with mean F1 gaps of +0.058 to +0.362 and Wilcoxon p <= 0.001 on six of seven datasets. Client-side verification completes under one second at one million rows. The threat model covers three empirically evaluated profiles and one theoretical Informed Attacker unable to defeat the cryptographic salt. Sentinel evasion probability ranges from near-zero to 0.82 for the most imbalanced data, which the twin layer offsets in every scenario.

cs.CR↗

Using Hyper-V Sockets for Real-time Data Extraction from a Malware Analysis Sandbox

We present how Hyper-V sockets can be used as a real-time communication channel for a malware analysis sandbox. We show that, compared to WinSock TCP sockets, Hyper-V sockets are not subject to TCP/IP-layer blocking and are not enumerated by common TCP connection listing tools. We compare the throughput of the two communication channels as a function of buffer size.

cs.CR↗

Trust Under Siege: Label Spoofing Attacks against Machine Learning for Android Malware Detection

Machine Learning (ML) malware detectors rely heavily on crowd-sourced AntiVirus (AV) labels, with platforms like VirusTotal serving as trusted sources of malware annotations. But what if attackers could manipulate these labels to classify benign software as malicious? We introduce label spoofing attacks, a new threat that contaminates crowd-sourced datasets by embedding minimal and undetectable malicious patterns into benign samples. These patterns coerce AV engines into misclassifying legitimate files as harmful, enabling poisoning attacks against ML-based malware classifiers trained on those data. We demonstrate this scenario by developing AndroVenom, a methodology for polluting realistic data sources and launching subsequent poisoning attacks against ML malware detectors. Experiments show that not only are state-of-the-art feature extractors unable to filter such injections, but various ML models experience Denial-of-Service (DoS) with as little as 1% poisoned samples. Additionally, attackers can flip decisions for specific unaltered benign samples by modifying only 0.015% of the training data, threatening their reputation and market share, while evading anomaly detectors operating on the training data. We conclude by raising concerns about the trustworthiness of ML training processes based on AV annotations and argue that further investigation is needed to develop more reliable labeling strategies.

cs.CR↗

Don't Trust the Code, Check Its Effects: Runtime Refinement for Regenerated Systems Code Under an Adversarial Generator

Recent work uses large language models to generate systems code from specifications, treating the specification as the durable artifact and the implementation as disposable. Regenerating the implementation specializes it to each workload and device. However, that work lives in a forgiving setting: a component's externally visible effects, its writes and device commands, are recoverable, and the generator is honest, so trust is discharged by re-execution. We target the unforgiving setting: systems code whose effects are irreversible, produced by a generator that may be adversarial. There, re-execution cannot check an effect after the fact, and a proof fails silently when its assumptions do. We take the position that the only safe way to operate here is to deny the generated code the authority to act. The generated code only plans, while a fixed trusted mediator owns every effect and performs one only when the specification would have produced it. Because the guarantee lives in the mediator, not the code, it survives regeneration. We instantiate this as a reference monitor for regenerated device drivers, and characterize the mediability envelope, six conditions on the effect vocabulary: legibility, spec-input observability, correlatability, completeness, outcome enumerability, and explicit durability. They decide when such mediation is possible.

cs.CR↗

Privacy-Preserving LLM Embedding Transmission for End-Cloud Collaboration

Recent studies improve on-device language model (LM) inference through end-cloud collaboration, where the end device retrieves useful information from cloud databases to enhance local processing, known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Typically, to retrieve information from the cloud while safeguarding privacy, the end device transforms original data into embeddings with a local embedding model. However, the recently emerging Embedding Inversion Attacks (EIAs) can still recover the original data from text embeddings (e.g., training a recovery model to map embeddings back to original texts), posing a significant threat to user privacy. To address this risk, we propose EntroGuard, an entropy-driven perturbation-based embedding privacy protection method, which can protect the privacy of text embeddings while maintaining retrieval accuracy during the end-cloud collaboration. Specifically, to defeat various EIAs, we perturb the embeddings to increase the entropy of the recovered text in the common structure of transformer-based recovery models, thus steering the embeddings toward meaningless texts rather than original sensitive texts during the recovery process. To maintain retrieval performance in the cloud, we constrain the perturbations within a bound, applying the strategy of reducing them where redundant and increasing them where sparse. Moreover, EntroGuard can be directly integrated into end devices without requiring any modifications to the embedding model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that EntroGuard effectively reduces privacy leakage metrics to near-zero levels against learning-based EIAs while also mitigating optimization-based EIAs with negligible loss of retrieval performance.

cs.CR↗

Disappearing Ink: Obfuscation Breaks N-gram Code Watermarks in Theory and Practice

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, making reliable identification of machine-generated code important for attribution, tracking, and misuse detection. Existing code watermarking methods are dominated by N-gram-based schemes, yet their robustness has mostly been evaluated only against simple edits or optimizations. We argue that this significantly overstates security, because software engineering already provides stronger semantics-preserving transformations in the form of code obfuscation. We study N-gram-based code watermarking under obfuscation. We formally model semantics-preserving transformations as a Markov random walk and prove that, under an intuitive and experimentally supported assumption called distribution consistency, obfuscation can nullify the robustness of N-gram-based watermarks. If the original detector has a false positive rate fpr, then after obfuscation, its failure rate on watermarked code approaches 1 - fpr. We validate this theory on three state-of-the-art watermarking schemes, two LLMs, two programming languages, four benchmarks, and four obfuscators. Across all settings, detectors collapse to near-random performance on obfuscated code (AUROC tightly around 0.5), and for each language, at least one attack leaves all post-obfuscation AUROC scores below 0.6. These results jointly show that current N-gram-based code watermarks are not robust to realistic obfuscation attacks and motivate more semantics-aware alternatives.

cs.CR↗

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair it with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Additional evaluations with SWE-Agent and OpenAI Codex exhibit similar trends, indicating that JAWS-Bench can be reused across multiple agent frameworks. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

cs.CR↗