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At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly achieve long-horizon tasks by combining foundation models with explicit skills and implicit procedural knowledge acquired through execution. The resulting task-solving capabilities have become valuable proprietary assets, raising a new security question: can a substantially weaker attacker-controlled agent acquire the capabilities of a stronger proprietary agent through limited black-box interaction? Existing skill-stealing attacks recover explicit skill artifacts, yet we show that artifact leakage does not necessarily transfer capability: a weaker agent may possess the same skills but still fail because it lacks procedural behaviors implicitly realized by the stronger agent. Our key insight is that the skill execution gap itself forms a leakage surface, where missing behaviors are exposed through observable differences between successful victim executions and failed attacker executions. Based on this, we present AgentLeak, a black-box capability-cloning attack that identifies capability-critical behaviors from these execution differences and incorporates them into attacker-side skills, while keeping the attacker's model, harness, and tools unchanged. Across 20 task scenarios comprising 600 instances, diverse agent systems, and multiple backbone models, AgentLeak improves task pass rates by over 40% compared with direct skill reuse and recovers more than 80% of the victim--attacker capability gap. Our findings reveal a confidentiality risk in LLM agents: protecting explicit artifacts alone is insufficient, as observable execution behavior can leak the procedural knowledge required to reconstruct proprietary task-solving capabilities in low-capability and attacker-controlled agents.

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Frequency-Domain Mixing Data Augmentation for Malicious Traffic Detection

The strong dynamics of network traffic often force malicious traffic detection models to handle out-of-distribution data. Typically, deep learning-based malicious traffic detection models require a large amount of high-quality training data. However, owing to challenges such as high labeling difficulty and resource consumption, existing datasets often suffer from insufficient diversity and fail to capture evolving traffic patterns, leading to poor out-of-distribution generalization ability of the trained models. Data augmentation has been widely adopted to improve data diversity and model generalization. Recently, frequency-domain mixing augmentation has shown promising performance because it effectively perturbs data while preserving key structural information. This approach shows potential for enhancing malicious traffic detection models. However, existing studies lack theoretical interpretation of the mixing mechanism, and do not adapt to the characteristics of network traffic. In this paper, we first conduct a theoretical analysis of the current frequency-domain mixing method, revealing its underlying principles and limitations. We further propose an improved frequency-domain mixing-based data augmentation method for network traffic data, which enhances the diversity of sequence features in network traffic and improves the out-of-distribution generalization of malicious traffic detection models. Extensive experiments on multiple artificial and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method substantially improves detection performance across diverse network environments and outperforms other data augmentation approaches.

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The Oversight Gap: What LLM Safety Monitors Miss, and Why It Is Not Capability

Several properties safety monitors are asked to certify, among them cross-tenant noninterference, sandbagging and evaluation awareness, are 2-safety hyperproperties, witnessed only by two executions. The standard consequence is a binary impossibility: one trace cannot decide them. We replace the binary with a measurement. A tight bound puts the balanced accuracy of any single-trace monitor at $\tfrac12+\tfrac12\,TV(P_0,P_1)$, turning undecidability into a graded detectability frontier and defining an oversight gap: a monitor's shortfall below it. On a leak family with closed-form $TV$, nine LLM monitors are optimal at $TV=0$ but capture little signal as $TV$ grows; at $TV=1$, where a 20-line membership check scores $100\%$, they average $60.9\%$. That shortfall is mostly not capability: naming what to check closes $61\%$ of it while leaving the $TV=0$ control at chance. The same split runs through a $2{\times}2$ factorial: an imagined second run leaves monitors at chance ($50.4\%$) while the same rule on an executed second run reaches $90.0\%$, and a stored oracle without a comparison procedure yields only $68.2\%$. Information and procedure are each necessary and neither is capability. Under nondeterminism, replay tracks a closed-form $k$-replay curve only under the right projection, and a projection frontier shows the resulting dilemma is forced: narrow misses $98.6\%$ of off-channel leaks, broad flags $75.7\%$ of clean traffic, and attainable accuracy decays like $1/(qm)$ in the benign-variation rate and the channel count. Finally, two frontier LLM judges certified an earlier version of our own benchmark as sound while a sign test found a directional bias ($p=2.7\times10^{-5}$) that invalidated three of our findings. Construction validity for hyperproperty benchmarks should be proved mechanically, not audited by models.

cs.LG↗

Enhancing Privacy, Neglecting Harms: An Analysis of Real-World Digital Privacy Incidents

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have emerged as a technical means for providing individuals with greater control over their information. Yet despite the growing deployment of PETs, people continue to experience privacy harms. In this work, we revisit our understanding of privacy incidents and the realities of those experiencing privacy harms, to assess whether the goals and abilities of PETs are misaligned with the harms people face. For our study, we collect news articles that correspond to a sample of 257 real-world privacy incidents. We employ content analysis over the articles to develop a new information flow model that encompasses the complexity of data flows and their relation to resulting harms. We demonstrate that our model captures both established and novel aspects of privacy incidents and their mitigations. In particular, it captures why consent is often insufficient to prevent privacy violations, how harms emerge from complex interactions among multiple entities and actions, and reveals a flaw in our understanding of PETs: a focus on enabling functionalities still permits the harms inherent in those functionalities. Moreover, we find that the entities best positioned to implement harm-preventing measures for the incidents in our sample are the least incentivized to do so. Overall, our model and analysis identify limitations of privacy technology research for harm prevention and further identifies paths for transforming how we approach the advancement of these technologies.

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Towards a Resilience-Theoretic Foundation for Adversarial Robustness in Industrial Control System Anomaly Detection

Anomaly-based intrusion detection systems in industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) environments are increasingly required to meet formal resilience criteria: absorbed adversarial disturbances, graceful degradation under sustained attack, and certified system-level guarantees. Existing resilience frameworks for cyber-physical systems define absorb-recover-adapt trajectories at the architectural level but do not treat machine learning anomaly detectors as first-class components, leaving a gap between component-level robustness evaluation and system-level resilience certification. In this paper, we establish that adversarial robustness in ICS anomaly detection is a specific instantiation of system resilience, and formalise this connection by mapping four resilience constructs, i.e. disturbance class, absorption capacity, recovery trajectory, and degradation function, onto the adversarial machine learning setting. We derive a compositional resilience bound for heterogeneous ICS detection networks, showing that the binding constraint on system-level resilience is the coupling-adjusted absorption capacity of each node along the attack path, not the per-node capacity -- so the binding node need not be the weakest one. Empirical validation on the BATADAL water distribution system benchmark demonstrates that the resulting metrics surface operationally significant phenomena invisible to standard benchmarks: the absorption-degradation divergence under adversarial training, and the paradox that hardening the binding node in isolation reduces system-level resilience. Implications for ICS architecture design and certification standards are discussed.

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Merging Cyber Threat Intelligence Through Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Small Language Models for Rich Threat Representation

Modern cybersecurity operations rely on CTI collected from heterogeneous sources, including semi-structured threat representations, IoCs, and narrative technical reports. However, these artifacts are often insufficient in isolation to reconstruct how an attack unfolds, under which conditions each step is feasible, and which traces it leaves behind. In practice, analysts must manually correlate partial evidence scattered across multiple and only partially structured sources, delaying the design of effective prevention, detection, and response actions. To address this gap, we propose an automated pipeline that derives an actionable representation of a cyberattack from heterogeneous CTI sources. The pipeline combines a RAG architecture with a locally deployable SLM, used to consolidate such evidence and infer missing operational details. Starting from a semi-structured threat representation and auxiliary CTI documents, the pipeline produces an enriched Attack Graph that captures a coarse, tactic-aligned progression of the attack and annotates each step with explicit pre-conditions and post-conditions, and an enriched description. This representation supports prevention by exposing execution requirements, detection by highlighting observable traces, and response by clarifying the temporal progression of the attack. Then, due to the lack of validated datasets with ground-truth information on the temporal evolution of real-world attacks, we test the complete pipeline on 10 real-world case studies spanning multiple threat types, including backdoors and staged downloaders delivered via phishing. A manual assessment across 10 real-world case studies provides initial evidence that the generated graphs are consistent with expected attack progressions, indicating that the proposed approach can support analysts by consolidating dispersed CTI evidence into a structured and actionable view of attacks.

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Robust Decentralized Personalized Federated Learning via Prediction-Constrained Neighborhood Collaboration

This paper proposes a robust decentralized personalized federated learning method R-DPFL, that enables clients to reduce the impact of Byzantine attacks via robust neighborhood direction estimation and history-based update trend prediction, rather than purely aggregating client models as in the existing work. In R-DPFL, each client first computes the current-round model update by aggregating the received neighborhood update vectors. It then predicts what this update should be based on its historical values and local model changes. Finally, R-DPFL computes the difference between these two quantities, adaptively clips this difference, and adds it to the local update. We prove convergence of the learning process through rigorous analysis and show that honest clients maintain stable personalized descent dynamics under Byzantine neighbor perturbations without requiring consensus among neighboring models. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate that RDPFL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art decentralized and personalized federated learning baselines under heterogeneous and adversarial settings.

cs.LG↗

Construction and Natural Language Querying of a Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph

Cybersecurity vulnerability information is distributed across numerous platforms and databases, making it difficult for researchers and practitioners to obtain a unified and structured understanding of existing threats. This is a critical issue in cybersecurity, where timely access to accurate vulnerability information directly impacts risk assessment and decision-making. While previous work has shown that knowledge graphs are effective for organizing vulnerability data, a major research gap remains in their accessibility, as querying such graphs typically requires expertise in graph query languages like Cypher. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing an approach that combines the construction of a cybersecurity knowledge graph with natural language-based interrogation. The proposed methodology relies on data collected from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD)(1) through its REST API and models vulnerabilities, products, vendors, severity metrics, weaknesses, and references using the Labeled Property Graph paradigm in Neo4j. The knowledge graph is deployed on Neo4j Aura Cloud and queried through an AI-assisted interface that translates natural language queries into Cypher language. The key contribution of this work is demonstrating that natural language querying significantly lowers the barrier to interacting with cybersecurity knowledge graphs, enabling more intuitive exploration and analysis of vulnerability data, and thereby enhancing their practical usefulness for a broader range of users in the cybersecurity field.

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Attestream: Usage-Aware Intermittent Data Distribution with Verifiable Lifecycle Provenance for Machine-Learning Data Streams

Providers of continuously produced, commercially valuable data -- sensor streams, telemetry, and other feeds sold as machine-learning training material -- cannot observe whether delivered data is actually used, while data that keeps flowing to inactive consumers enlarges the leakage surface without producing value. We present Attestream, a blockchain-based architecture for intermittently delivered dataset streams that couples continued delivery to verifiable usage reporting. Every lifecycle event -- dataset preparation, dual-signed delivery, derivative creation (e.g., a model), and derivative distribution -- is appended to an on-chain registry as a non-repudiable, mutually linked lifecycle record. The mechanism requires provable transfer, not tokenization: plain contract storage, ERC-721 tokens, and anchored off-chain receipts are interchangeable representations of the same protocol. A usage-aware gate suspends a consumer's stream when no derivative-creation record is registered within a reporting window; evaluated lazily inside the next delivery transaction, monitoring adds no dedicated transactions. A modality-pluggable fingerprinting layer binds any leaked copy to the dual-signed delivery record of the responsible consumer, instantiated for tabular/geospatial records, images, and documents. We implement the registry as a Solidity contract with EIP-712 dual signatures and evaluate it: a full lifecycle round costs 657k gas with plain records ($0.13 on rollups; ERC-721 tokenization adds ~30k gas per record), and over a 50-consumer pool leak attribution reaches 100% from 40 leaked table rows under moderate noise, survives JPEG recompression to quality 30, and tolerates paraphrase rates up to 30% for documents.

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SoK: Secure Software-Based Multi-Domain Data Segregation

Modern mission-critical coordination demands seamless communication across multiple domains. Traditionally, Voice Communication Systems (VCS) have relied on physically separated Red/Black architectures to ensure voice and data segregation. While these hardware-based methods provide strong security assurances and remain foundational in high-security contexts, they can introduce significant complexity and scalability challenges as mission parameters expand into highly dynamic, multi-domain integrations. As defence, emergency response, and critical infrastructure operations increasingly require interoperable, flexible, and cost-efficient communication environments, there is a growing need to understand whether software-based approaches can provide comparable assurance while supporting modern operational requirements. This SoK characterises a transition to software-based Multi-Domain Data Segregation (MDDS) by integrating systems security, networking, and cryptography. Its goal is to consolidate existing research, identify shared architectural patterns, and address the security challenges facing next-generation high-assurance software-based VCS architectures. By assessing software-defined and virtualized approaches, this SoK supports the development of scalable, high-assurance VCS architectures that facilitate secure real-time coordination across diverse operational domains. Specifically, this SoK examines the security implications of Software-Defined Networking, Network Slicing, Separation Kernels, and Cross-Domain Solutions while addressing challenges posed by quantum computing through Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This SoK provides a comprehensive analysis of the shift from hardware isolation to software segregation, serving as a crucial foundation for researchers and industry stakeholders aiming to enhance secure and adaptable VCS infrastructures for mission-critical operations.

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Do AI Coding Assistants Check Before They Install? A Pre-Registered Demand-Side Audit of Trust Signals in the Research Software Supply Chain

AI coding assistants now select, install, and configure software, and attackers have exploited that position through invented package names, compromised maintainer accounts, and manipulated repository text. In response, the supply-chain community publishes machine-checkable trust signals: software bills of materials, signed releases, build provenance attestations, and declared official channels. Whether coding assistants read or act on those signals has not been measured for any of these classes on research software. We pre-registered and ran a controlled study on six open-source research software projects (three HPC, three quantum computing) drawn from an 87-project corpus, with protocol, seed, panel, and analysis plan deposited with a DOI before any trial. W created nine modified copies for each project: no signal, one per signal class, two with a signature or attestation from the wrong issuer, one with all four signals, and one reproducing documented conflicts in the project's own metadata. Three models under two ways of operating an assistant, with and without an approval step, gave 1,920 registered trials, plus a supplement on three frontier models. We scored behavior from container logs rather than from what the assistant said, and recorded the cost of every trial. Verification was rare under every condition: in 9 of 1,920 registered trials (0.5%), the assistant opened any provenance signal before installing in 0 of 384 control trials, and no trial ran a verification command, so signal presence had no measurable effect. We drew three conclusions: publishing signals is necessary but not sufficient; price did not buy verification (the model that verified most often costs $0.10 per trial; the most capable, at $1.00, verified nothing); verification must be built into the program that runs the assistant. We release the per-trial cost ledger, the protocol, and every log.

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A Note on Binary Quadratic Systems and their relation to complexity theory

Deciding whether a system of multivariate quadratic equations over $\mathbb F_2$ has a solution is a classical NP-complete problem, and remains so for square systems, with as many equations as variables. The hardness of this problem is one of the cornerstones of nowadays post-quantum cryptography. Let $\MQ_0(n)$ and $\MQ_1(n)$ denote the sets of square quadratic systems in $n$ variables having respectively no solutions and exactly one solution. $\cup_{n\geq 2} \MQ_0(n)$ is a coNP-complete language, while $\cup_{n\geq 2} \MQ_1(n)$ lies in DP. It is known that $\lim_{n\to \infty} |\MQ_1(n)|/|\MQ_0(n)|=1$. Here we prove the explicit finite-$n$ bounds \[ |\MQ_0(n)|<|\MQ_1(n)| \le \left(1+\frac{1}{2^n-1}\right)|\MQ_0(n)|, \] More generally, let $Q_d$ be the space of polynomial functions $(\FF_2)^n\to\mathbb F_2$ of degree at most $d$, and let $α_k$ count square systems in $(Q_d)^n$ having exactly $k$ solutions. Then \[ α_0<α_1 \le \left(1+\frac{1}{2^n-1}\right)α_0\,, \qquad 2\le d\le n \,. \] The proof combines matroid and coding-theoretic methods. We interpret $(\FF_2)^n$ as the ground set of the evaluation matroid of $Q_d$, express $α_0$ and $α_1$ through characteristic polynomials, and use a Whitney-type sign-reversing involution to show that the only terms that can push $α_1-α_0$ below $α_1/2^n$ come from the elements of a matroid port. These are identified with minimal-support words of the Reed--Muller code $\RM(n-d-1,n)=\RM(d,n)^\perp$; the required estimate then follows from the MacWilliams identity, the minimum-distance bound $2^{d+1}$, and the even-weight structure of the code.

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Nothing Breaks: No Single Peer Can Soundly Gate Post-Quantum Delivery

Post-quantum protection is delivered to a peer, not declared in a file: whether a session is quantum-resistant is a relation between a server's configuration and the clients that reach it. We show that no single peer can soundly gate that relation. Shipped SSH clients are not ordered: two of their post-quantum capability classes are minimal and incomparable, so a check pinned to either misses the other family's withdrawal. A peer taking both fares no better: it falls back and misses both, or, where classical outranks one family, catches just that one. No case flags both. Nothing above the wire carries the relation either. An artifact-side instrument cannot encode it, because a peer population is not one of its inputs; and across seven configurations on two protocols we find that not one of the five scalars deployed auditors expose to automation moves, while unrelated degradation moves the ones that discriminate at all: the auditors do compute the delivered algorithm, and discard it at the interface automation reads. Nothing else catches the loss either, because nothing breaks: removing a hybrid key exchange starts the daemon, validates the configuration, passes the tests and serves the client, and the adversary it defends against does not exist yet, so no functional signal can carry the loss even in principle. We then show that agents make that state reachable at scale, driving a validated downgrade in 40 of 40 episodes from ordinary engineering prose, against 0 of 40 on a matched neutral document.

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EventSpec: Defining and Detecting Event-Semantic Issues in Blockchain Ecosystems

In recent years, smart contracts have become the backbone of decentralized applications (DApps), and off-chain systems such as bridges, wallets, and indexers rely heavily on event logs to track contract execution and state changes. However, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) does not validate or enforce event semantics, so logs can diverge from on-chain state, misleading off-chain systems into accepting incorrect state transitions. Existing smart contract vulnerability detection tools focus on logic bugs, with limited support for detecting event-semantic defects. To address this gap, we collect audit reports and incident cases and apply open card sorting to define five classes of event-semantic defects: event collision, state-event mismatch, unauthorized event emission, event emission mismatch, and event parameter mismatch. We propose EventSpec, which infers event specifications from a contract corpus via behavior inference and semantic-constraint extraction and applies differential checking to identify event-semantic defects in target contracts. We run EventSpec on 6,617 real-world contracts and evaluate detection effectiveness based on manually labeled results; EventSpec achieves an overall comprehensive precision of 90.17%. We further provide an off-chain evaluation harness that reproduces two off-chain attack vectors on any EVM-compatible chain: event origin confusion caused by unintended emitters and event-state desynchronization where events lack matching state updates. Using this harness, we demonstrate the feasibility of these attacks on bridge relayers, blockchain explorers, and NFT marketplaces, and report six wallet issues, four of which were confirmed (including a $600 bounty), with two remaining pending.

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A Novel Steganography Scheme Using Quantum Hilbert Transform

The main goal of steganography is to transmit hidden messages in legitimate-looking communication messages. Phase-domain information hiding, however, has not been fully explored for quantum systems. This work introduces a finite-dimensional Quantum Hilbert Transform (QHT) as a unitary phase operator based on the Quantum Fourier Transform. Using this construction, we develop a QHT-based quantum steganography scheme that embeds classical bits as weak signed phase perturbations of quantum cover states. Bob recovers the hidden message through binary state discrimination, block aggregation, and classical error-correcting decoding.

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"Shut Up and Let Me Enjoy My Otome": Understanding and Measuring the Toxicity in Otome Game Communities

Otome games, a romance simulation genre primarily targeting female, have emerged as a major force in the global gaming market, attracting hundreds of millions of players and billions in revenue. Despite their popularity, otome game communities face pervasive online toxicity, which has been largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first large-scale measurement of toxicity in otome game communities across social platforms. We introduce OtomeSCAN, a framework for collecting, evaluating, and analyzing 620,045 posts from Weibo and Reddit spanning 18 months. To support robust analysis, we manually annotated a ground-truth dataset of 4,308 posts, identifying eight target groups such as players and game developers. We evaluate seven toxicity detectors on the dataset, including general-purpose models and our proposed LLM-based detectors, with our best model achieving F1-scores of 0.82 (Weibo) and 0.78 (Reddit). Our analysis reveals significant platform-based differences in toxicity: 22.20% of otome-related posts on Weibo are toxic, compared to 3.71% on Reddit. Besides, real-world events like in-community conflicts can rapidly escalate toxicity, with toxicity ratios increasing to 37.09% in just 72 hours during an external attack on Weibo. We also flag 191 potential-coordination clusters in otome game communities, 64.40% of which target game developers, with several accounts participating repeatedly across multiple clusters. We hope our work inspires further research on community-specific toxicity and contributes to building healthier online spaces for marginalized gaming communities.

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VEX-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Assessing Exploitability of Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

The software supply chain has become an increasingly exposed attack surface because of its reliance on intricate yet fragile dependencies. Existing defenses such as GitHub Dependabot often raise many false alerts because their coarse-grained matching cannot determine whether a vulnerable dependency is actually exploitable. Security analysts typically spend substantial time assessing vulnerability exploitability case by case. Recent LLM agents have emerged as promising candidates for this task given their advanced capabilities in coding and cybersecurity, yet no existing benchmark evaluates them on it. Prior benchmarks target zero-day settings, where agents detect and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. In contrast, software supply chain security focuses on how known vulnerabilities in upstream dependencies affect downstream projects. This requires agents to reason across repositories and determine whether an upstream vulnerability is exploitable in the downstream project. To address this gap, we introduce VEX-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM agents' ability to assess the exploitability of software supply chain vulnerabilities. It contains 75 real-world cases mined from GitHub and labeled by security experts, covering Python, Java, and Go. We evaluate nine models across three agent harnesses. While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 reach approximately 80% F1 on binary vulnerability-status classification, only GPT-5.5 surpasses 70% macro-F1 on fine-grained justification classification. This gap highlights the challenge of moving beyond binary exploitability assessment to identifying fine-grained exploitability reasons. Code and data: https://github.com/steven1518/vex-bench

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Compute-Bounded Security Assurance - Coverage, Verification, and Response under Resource Constraints

Additional inference compute can increase the number of correctly resolved security-assurance tasks, but repeated success, unique coverage, accepted evidence, and operational protection are different quantities. We develop a resource-constrained framework that separates them. For repeated conditionally independent attempts with latent success probability $Θ$, coverage is $C_n = 1 - E[(1-Θ)^n]$, and its limiting value is $1 - P(Θ= 0)$. Positive pairwise outcome correlation does not by itself imply a ceiling below one: we construct two models with the same mean success and pairwise correlation but different limiting coverage. We distinguish this result from the effective sample size used to estimate a mean, and show why finite-budget observations cannot generally identify an asymptotic support ceiling. We then connect coverage to fallible evidence checking, proper scoring of factual grounding, complete resource accounting, service capacity, and a response model that includes mitigation delay. A conceptual defensive architecture separates evidence analysis, adjudication, and operational authority. An evaluation protocol specifies held-out tasks, paired comparisons, negative cases, and uncertainty reporting. The contribution is a consistent theoretical synthesis and a set of counterexamples to invalid extrapolations, rather than an empirical scaling law. All numerical illustrations are analytic; no model-parity result, hardware benchmark, or general attacker-defender equilibrium is claimed.

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