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At least 541 records · Page 30Linked to original sources

DisCTI: Who Needs to Know Timely? Automated Sector-Aware Cyber Threat Intelligence Dissemination

The timely dissemination of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is critical for organizations to mount swift and effective incident response. When valid CTI is delivered to the right sector at the right time, identical attacks can often be contained or mitigated. However, today's rapidly expanding CTI landscape overwhelms analysts, who must sift through massive and heterogeneous feeds. Existing platforms such as the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) provide sector tagging features (e.g., energy, finance, government), but in practice, these remain largely unmapped (98% of events are left uncategorized). This lack of automated and timely sector mapping severely limits the operational value of shared intelligence, leaving organizations that belong especially to the critical information infrastructure sector exposed. To address this gap, we formulate sector-targeted CTI dissemination as a multilabel classification problem. Leveraging deep field knowledge of CTI structures and sector-specific threat patterns, we construct a novel data set of 872 sector-labelled CTI events from a threat intelligence platform (TIP). We then apply BERT, a transformer-based model, to automate the mapping of CTI events to sectors. Using the structured threat information expression (STIX) format for cross-platform interoperability, our approach achieves a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.89 at a Hamming loss of 0.055 on the custom dataset, i.e. 94.5% of individual sector-label assignments are correct. These results not only demonstrate the feasibility of sector-aware, automated CTI dissemination but also highlight how embedding expert field knowledge into machine learning design fills a crucial gap in the threat intelligence pipeline, enabling faster and context-relevant defensive action.

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CHISEL-ing Back Source Code with AI-enabled Iterative Recovery

Decompilation aims to recover high-level, compilable, and semantically equivalent code from binaries. Traditional decompilers produce pseudo-C that is difficult to read and does not compile, while the recent LLM-assisted approaches generate readable, but semantically incorrect code. LLM-aided iterative recovery is an emerging branch of research, but prior works rely on supplied test suites for semantic recovery. In this work, we present CHISEL, a test suite-free framework to iteratively recover source code from Ghidra-derived pseudo-C. CHISEL uses simple yet effective feedback from a compiler (static analysis) and a coverage-guided fuzzer (differential analysis), augmented by rich observables for grounded divergence detection and feedback, cross-iteration divergence memory, and best candidate retention. We systematically evaluate CHISEL for compilation and semantic recovery, feedback oracle soundness, and iteration overhead on 120 ExeBench functions compiled for the x86-64 architecture, across four optimizations (O0-O3), in both stripped and unstripped variants, using the open-weight Gemma4:31b LLM. CHISEL, with all recommended features, achieves an average of 96.1% re-compilability and 79.8% re-executability rates at an average of 2.1 iterations. Significantly, CHISEL recovers 26% of first-generation execution errors. At the same time, CHISEL feedback oracle falsely accepts only 9.4% candidates. Lastly, CHISEL performs significantly better than two recent prior work on LLM-assisted decompilation.

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CAITLYN: Can LLM Agents Autonomously Synthesize Defenses against Emerging Injection Attacks?

Prompt injection attacks on Large Language Model (LLM) agents seek to introduce malicious instructions or content into external text sources retrieved by agents, forcing the underlying LLMs to execute harmful actions outside their benign scope. While current defenses effectively counter known injection attacks, deploying them in LLM agent environments remains challenging due to attack variants and emerging threats. Moreover, existing solutions typically suffer from an inherent trilemma, i.e., a constant trade-off among runtime efficiency, contextual precision, and adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose Continuous Agents for Injection Threats via Lifelong Yielding Nexus (CAITLYN), an agent-agnostic defense middleware. CAITLYN integrates two systems. System I focuses on immediate defense against existing attacks using a two-tiered library: Tier-0 for rule-based detection scripts and Tier-1 for optimized LLM-based accurate inference. System II, in contrast, is deployed to monitor potential abnormal signals and attempt to synthesize new defenses. On standard benchmarks, CAITLYN matches the detection performance of state-of-the-art defenses at lower token overhead than LLM-as-a-judge baselines. On Emerging, our new delivery-aware benchmark featuring novel injection techniques, static baselines and the standalone System I configuration remain vulnerable. In contrast, System II autonomously synthesizes verified defense capabilities, substantially lowering the attack success rate across three diverse agent environments.

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The Impact of Magma: A Ground-Truth Fuzzing Benchmark

Magma is an open-source and ground-truth fuzzing benchmark that enables uniform fuzzer evaluation and comparison. Magma was originally released with a research paper published at ACM SIGMETRICS 2021. This short paper explains the motivation, the design, and the impact of Magma, with a description of extensions to the original benchmark.

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TagZilla: Automated Owner and Abuse Type Tagging for Indicators of Compromise in Threat Reports

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports often describe Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) such as IP addresses, URLs, file hashes, and cryptocurrency wallets involved in cyberattacks. Those IoCs are typically described in the unstructured report's text, or listed at the end of the report with little context, limiting their usefulness. This paper presents TagZilla, a platform that, given a threat report, automatically analyzes its text and tags the IoCs it describes with contextual information about the threat group and malware family that the IoC belongs to and the type of abuse associated with the IoC (e.g., phishing, sextortion, command-and-control). TagZilla provides a novel LLM-based approach to assign owner tags to IoCs using an open-world classification, and assigns 29 abuse type tags to IoCs using a closed-world classification. We evaluate TagZilla on a manually generated ground truth of 100 threat reports containing 1,534 indicators, where it achieves an F1 score of 0.94 for owner tagging and 0.93 for abuse type tagging. Then, we apply TagZilla to tag 765 threat reports, identifying 15,583 IoCs belonging to 637 malware families, 113 threat groups, and 162 other entities. The results show that TagZilla can tag IoCs even in reports describing multiple actors and malware families, enabling the generation of IoC profiles for those entities.

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Layered LLM Defenses as an Ensemble: Access Tiers, Inference Cost, and the Measured Failure Correlation Between Defense Layers

Practitioners defend large language models (LLMs) by stacking defenses, assuming the layers compound. A stack is an ensemble, and ensembles compound only under a condition the LLM security literature recommends but never measures: the members must fail on different inputs. Two instruments make that measurable. The Adversary Access-Tier Model (AATM) grades an adversary by the access it holds, from system-only (A0) to influence over training data (A4). A cost model sorts defenses into five classes of inference-time overhead; because two classes require training weights or reading activations, they tier the defender as AATM tiers the adversary. From these we derive how a stack behaves, and the quantities a defender cares about diverge: coverage saturates within a tier, cost rises by class, false refusals accumulate as a union, and residual attack success falls multiplicatively only under independence. We measure that independence. Running one adaptive adversary against a seven-layer stack, failure correlation is positive in all fifteen measurable pairs ($ϕ$ from $0.30$ to $0.75$), and the joint residual exceeds the multiplicative prediction by up to $0.172$. Stratifying on behavior difficulty dissolves most of the association, so the dependence is predominantly common-cause, but it survives permutation inference, majority-vote grader labels, and externally calibrated thresholds. The same stack refuses four in five benign prompts while remaining statistically indistinguishable from its strongest single layer. The dependence is architectural rather than sampling-based: members correlate through the model they all wrap, so no wider member pool weakens it. Diversity therefore selects stack members but does not predict what an assembled stack delivers, which has to be measured end to end.

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False-CSI Attacks in Power-Domain NOMA for 6G: A Threat Taxonomy and System-Level Impacts

Power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) remains a widely studied technique for improving spectral efficiency and supporting dense connectivity in beyond-5G and 6G networks. Its main operating mechanisms, however, depend on the integrity of channel-state information (CSI). Power allocation, user ordering, pairing, clustering, and beamforming can all be distorted when the CSI consumed by the base station is deliberately biased rather than merely noisy. This article examines false CSI as an attack surface in power-domain NOMA. We organize the threat space using a compact taxonomy with two primary axes: magnitude, which distinguishes underreporting from overreporting, and ordering effect, which distinguishes order-preserving, boundary, and order-reversing attacks. We then show how coordinated false- CSI behavior, group-changing attacks, direction forgery, pilot spoofing, training-phase injection, and RIS-induced channel manipulation extend this basic taxonomy. Finally, we map each attack family to system-level impacts on power allocation, SIC reliability, scheduler behavior, fairness, throughput, and secrecy. The central message is that false CSI should be treated not only as a channel-estimation problem, but also as a control-input integrity problem for 6G NOMA.

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Optimal Adversarial Testing: Extracting Honest Test Results from Dishonest Test Takers

In applications, it is often required to test objects or people to determine their qualities in terms of certain metrics. However, besides being naturally noisy, the test results can be corrupted by adversarial behaviors of objects or people being tested (test takers). For example, dishonest test takers can cheat in the exams to distort the test results. With the development of AI technologies, such distortions driven by cheating using AI technologies are becoming more commonplace and severe. In this paper, we propose optimal testing strategies which can still recover needed test results even if there are cheaters polluting the results. The proposed testing strategies will optimally re-test selected group of test takers using different testing security measures. We determine the optimal testing strategies using a dynamic programming method.

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CamoDocs: A Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Using Camouflaged Documents

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) augments LLMs with external documents, but public or user-editable sources expose RAG systems to data poisoning: attackers can inject malicious documents to steer outputs toward targeted answers. Existing poisoning attacks often rely on query inclusion, inserting the target query into poisoned documents to improve retrieval; however, this creates lexical and embedding-space artifacts that make them easy to filter. We propose CamoDocs, a poisoning attack that avoids direct query inclusion by camouflaging adversarial documents among benign content. CamoDocs chunks synthesized benign and adversarial drafts, replaces selected tokens in benign chunks with dispersion tokens that spread poisoned-document embeddings, and applies coherence filtering to limit readability degradation. Across seven RAG defenses, three open-weight LLMs, and three benchmarks, CamoDocs achieves strong average ASR while avoiding query-overlap artifacts exploited by simple query detection. It also remains effective against proprietary models, achieving average ASRs of 61.80% on GPT-5.4-mini and 55.09% on Claude-Haiku-4.5. Finally, we show that erasure-heavy clustering defenses such as TrustRAG can reduce ASR, but only with substantial utility drops on retrieval-dependent benchmarks such as NeoQA. Code is available at https://github.com/jaewonalive/CamoDocs.

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BEACON: Behavior-Anchored Cross-Source Knowledge Graph Construction for Cyber Threat Intelligence

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is foundational to modern cyber defense, yet much of it resides in unstructured reports whose volume and heterogeneity far exceed manual analysis, motivating research on automatically constructing knowledge graphs from CTI reports. However, existing approaches mainly extract partial information within a single report, leaving the cross-source setting unexplored, where the same threat is given unrelated names. Our key insight is that attack behaviors, once mapped to MITRE ATT&CK (a standardized catalog of attack techniques), can anchor the rest of a report. Attack behaviors are the adversarial actions a report describes, while contextual entities (e.g., threat actors, campaigns, and affected products) and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs; e.g., IP addresses) are their participants and traces. Attaching them to these anchors places every per-report graph in one canonical space. We realize this insight in BEACON, an LLM-driven framework for cross-source CTI knowledge graph construction. Its first stage extracts each report into a graph under a propose-then-verify paradigm, grounding candidates in report evidence and official ATT&CK definitions, to suppress LLM misclassification and hallucination. Its second stage merges these graphs with a hierarchical alignment strategy that applies signals in decreasing order of determinism, from character-level and semantic similarity to overlapping technique neighborhoods, iterating as merges pool neighborhoods. No existing benchmark links entities to technique anchors or provides cross-source alignment ground truth. We therefore construct and release two human-annotated datasets from 34 sources: to our knowledge the largest for report-level CTI extraction (8,395 elements) and the first for cross-source consolidation (3,487). On them, BEACON outperforms all baselines by at least 23% and 9%, respectively.

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When Verified Source Becomes Attack Input: Defending Smart Contracts Against LLM-Based Vulnerability Scanning

Smart contracts are financial programs deployed on blockchains to manage digital assets. To build trust with users and investors, smart contract projects typically publish their source code on blockchain explorers and verify it against the deployed bytecode, making the on-chain program accessible through a human-readable implementation. However, LLM agents are changing the threat model of this disclosure mechanism. By leveraging publicly disclosed source code, recent agent workflows make it increasingly practical to scan contract vulnerabilities for exploits at large scale. In this paper, we propose DeLLMGuard, a smart contract deployment framework that defends against malicious LLM-based vulnerability scanning while preserving public source disclosure and authorized auditing. DeLLMGuard can separate disclosed source code from runtime execution through multiple contract addresses in a real-world blockchain environment. LLM agents must therefore recover additional proxy, delegate, and factory relations before vulnerability analysis. A built-in Verification Layer checks deployment relations, runtime bytecode, source code, and state changes to ensure that the transformation preserves the original business implementation. We evaluate DeLLMGuard on 387 real-world vulnerable contracts with three LLM agents in an environment derived from SCONE-bench. DeLLMGuard reduces overall root-cause correctness from 23.5% to 6.6% and outperforms the closed-source bytecode baseline on the primary non-proxy set. Trace and ablation analyses further show that agents often recover downstream contracts but still fail to identify the vulnerability, indicating that cross-contract recovery remains a major challenge for automated LLM scanning.

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LongPIBench: A Long-Context Benchmark for Prompt Injection

Prompt injection attacks pose a serious security risk to large language models in real-world applications. However, existing prompt injection benchmarks primarily focus on short-context inputs, leaving the attacks and defenses in long-context settings largely unexplored. This gap leads to a substantial overestimation of the effectiveness of current defenses. In this paper, we bridge the gap by introducing LongPIBench, a long-context benchmark for prompt injection covering 4 realistic application scenarios: paper peer review, resume screening, code review, and email summary. For each scenario, we construct a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset, with context lengths ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of tokens. The evaluation results on LongPIBench reveal significant vulnerabilities of prompt injection defenses under long-context settings: even simple heuristic prompt injection attacks achieve high success rates and frequently bypass state-of-the-art defenses. We hope LongPIBench can serve as a practical benchmark for systematically evaluating prompt injection defenses in realistic long-context scenarios.

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Exploiting Per-Core Leakage: Electromagnetic Side-Channel Monitoring of Multicore Architectures

Multicore processors are increasingly adopted in embedded systems to meet growing performance demands. However, physical side-channel analysis of multicore architectures remains underexplored, as obtaining usable leakage is inherently challenging. Consequently, side-channel security research on such systems has lagged far behind, leaving a critical security gap. To address this gap, we reveal the electromagnetic leakage mechanisms in multicore architectures and, for the first time, demonstrate per-core leakage exploitation, thereby enabling physical side-channel analysis for these systems. As a practical extension, we present a non-intrusive side-channel monitoring method that achieves per-core granularity. To validate its feasibility and practicality, we implement a prototype on a heterogeneous SoC platform with an RF front-end, and evaluate on a commercial off-the-shelf quad-core embedded system, the Raspberry Pi 4B with ARM Cortex-A72 cores.

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Quantum-Based Solutions for Security Enhancement in Open Radio Access Networks

Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) introduce unprecedented flexibility, interoperability, and intelligence into next-generation wireless systems, but their disaggregated and software-defined architecture also expands the attack surface and creates new security vulnerabilities. Conventional cryptographic mechanisms, while effective against classical threats, may become insufficient in the presence of quantum-enabled adversaries. This article presents a comprehensive perspective on quantum security for O-RAN, examining how quantum-resilient mechanisms can enhance confidentiality, authentication, and trust across the RAN ecosystem. It discusses post-quantum cryptography (PQC), quantum cryptography, quantum authentication, and quantum-enhanced threat detection within a zero-trust architecture based on continuous verification, least privilege, and micro-segmentation. Their integration with the Near-Real-Time (Near-RT) RAN Intelligent Controller, O-Cloud, and open interfaces is analyzed, together with practical deployment considerations, technology maturity, and adoption timelines. Finally, open research directions are outlined toward secure, resilient, and future-proof O-RAN architectures for 6G networks.

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LLM-Based Agents for Software and Systems Security: Approaches, Applications, and Assessment

Software and systems security workflows are typically procedural: analysts inspect heterogeneous artifacts, form hypotheses, invoke tools, interpret outputs, and revise plans. Large language model (LLM)-based agents, which can plan, use tools, retain state, and revise actions across multi-step workflows, are being rapidly adopted to automate this work. Given the consequences of delegating security decisions to autonomous systems, understanding how such agents are built, used, and assessed is crucial. Yet to this date, there remains a lack of systematic understanding of what has been done and how far we are in this field: the term "agent" is applied inconsistently, applications differ sharply in risk, and assessment protocols are often incomparable. To gain a comprehensive and coherent view of this area hence inform relevant future research, this paper provides a systematic literature review of the (1) technical approaches, including agent architecture, perception, memory, reasoning and planning, action space, orchestration, and self-improvement, (2) applications, with respect to the security tasks served, and (3) assessment, including the datasets, outcome and trajectory metrics, safety measures, and baselines considered, over the peer-reviewed literature spanning the emergence of this area (2023--2026). Our synthesis reveals a field that has built agents able to act but not yet agents whose authority is bounded or whose behavior is auditable. In addition to knowledge systematization, we also extend our insights into the limitations of and challenges faced by current approach, application, and assessment designs, which shed light on potentially promising future research directions.

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REPLICANT: Learning Policies for Evading and Hardening Malware Detectors

To determine the real-world effectiveness of machine learning based malware detection, it is vital to evaluate its robustness against highly capable adversaries. However, state-of-the-art attacks do not effectively model realistic adversaries, as they often assume access to privileged information such as the training data, feature space, or confidence scores of the target. In this work, we present Replicant, a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns the realistic task of evasion under a strict label-only black-box threat model. Replicant learns a reusable policy on how to modify a malware sample and when to query the target, which transfers across samples, detectors, and feature spaces. Across seven Android malware detectors and three feature spaces, Replicant is the strongest and most query-efficient approach achieving a mean attack success rate of 78.8%, a relative improvement of 20.9%-39.2% over the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, when used for adversarial training, Replicant also outperforms the state-of-the art by producing detectors with more generalizable robustness. With Replicant we demonstrate that learning the task of evasion not only results in stronger attack performance but, crucially, provides a better signal for hardening malware detectors.

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Recognition Without Enforcement: Configuration-Dependent Failures in LLM Agent Instruction Arbitration and External Control

LLM agents arbitrate among instructions from system prompts, users, memory, and tools, but this arbitration cannot be assumed to enforce trust boundaries. We identify a recognition-enforcement gap: source-format features (role-template position, channel metadata, formatting cues) are linearly decodable from model activations, and models can explicitly identify forged authority when prompted, yet some configurations still produce the conflicting tool call. We use "recognition" in this specific decodable-source-format-plus-verbalized-detection sense; crossed-probe controls show it is not a unified abstract trust representation. The gap is not an immutable property of model weights. Restrictive policies and diverse prompts can eliminate execution on the same models, while permissive configurations and particular prompt-model pairs yield deterministic failures. Across a fleet evaluation (authority spoofing: 46 model endpoints across 6 vendors including open-weight; memory conflict: 48 models), average execution under diverse novel attacks is 1.21% [0.5-2.1%] (model-clustered CI over 14,294 spoofed trials from 29 models), but vulnerability is concentrated in reproducible cells and shifts across deployment windows (up to 47pp within-window per-fingerprint range). Prompt-layer defenses likewise fail to generalize across models and adaptive formulations. We therefore treat model self-arbitration as a capability rather than a security boundary and implement an external reference monitor combining authenticated source routing with capability-gated tool execution. It deterministically rejects all tested forged, tampered, replayed, and unsigned requests while preserving legitimate operations. A separate adaptive red-team found one implementation flaw (a since-patched clock-skew admission), not a cryptographic bypass. Secure agents require external enforcement, not merely better recognition.

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Offline-Verifiable Accountability for Cross-Organization Agent Messaging: A Preserved Evidence-Bundle Approach

Cross-organization agent workflows require preserved evidence that remains independently verifiable during later audit or dispute review. They may involve multiple organizations, delegated actions, policy-relevant events, and disputed accountability claims. This is difficult when live systems are unavailable, controlled by one party, or not trusted by all participants. Existing mechanisms provide useful pieces, including authenticated logging, delegation semantics, signed checkpoints, and consistency checks. What remains missing is a verifier-centered event-level bundle for checking evidence sufficiency offline under an explicit policy. We propose a preserved evidence-bundle model and a policy-controlled offline verifier for agent-to-agent workflow events. Each bundle preserves policy-required evidence, including sender authentication, authenticated log commitment, witness-backed checkpoint evidence, append-only continuity, delegation-aware authorization evidence, and explicit receiver-signed receipt evidence when required. The verifier accepts only claims supported by the selected policy-required evidence, giving a later reviewer an offline basis for assessing evidence sufficiency. It does not infer delivery or receipt from transport behavior or log inclusion alone. In a prototype evaluation over 300 complete workflows and 1200 valid preserved bundles, we measure offline verifier-side latency across policy profiles and workflow-event evidence requirements. Checkpoint-context anchoring has the highest latency in the current prototype, while delegation and workflow-prerequisite evidence require additional verification steps. In targeted negative-evidence tests, all corrupted or policy-insufficient bundles were rejected, with no false acceptance observed. These results support evidence-based audit and dispute review without relying on live services or platform-specific logs.

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