CyberSec Research

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly automate offensive operations across the cyber kill chain, their efficacy in complex local post-exploitation tasks remains inadequately quantified. Among these, Linux privilege escalation is a key step between initial access and full system compromise. However, existing evaluations for this task are limited by small sample sizes (fewer than 15 scenarios), lacking the scale to compare model capabilities under executable verification. To address this, we present PrivEscalate, a large-scale benchmark for Linux privilege escalation, comprising 531 Dockerized scenarios spanning 14 sub-categories. We additionally derive 329 parameterized variants to measure sensitivity to environmental distractors. Evaluating six LLMs across three agent architectures reveals: (i) model capability is heterogeneous across vulnerability classes, with no single model dominating across the high-prevalence classes, motivating multi-dimensional risk assessments; (ii) LLM successes are sensitive to environmental perturbation, so configuration rotation can disrupt some exploit attempts but does not eliminate the measured risk; and (iii) agent architectures can materially change success rates and reorder model rankings, though the magnitude is model-dependent. Leveraging these insights, we develop PrivEscAgent, a domain-specialized wrapper that augments a generic ReAct agent with deterministic enumeration, category matching, and step planning. PrivEscAgent improves over prior Linux privilege-escalation agent baselines without underlying LLM modifications. We release PrivEscalate as an open-source, Dockerized measurement instrument supporting LLM agent evaluation, defensive tool validation, and red-team training.

The rapid integration of AI into human-centred systems such as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) has created a poorly understood attack surface linking neural signals to physical systems. Exploits in this domain threaten cognitive autonomy, mental privacy, and physical safety, from neural data exfiltration to malicious control of BCI-tethered devices. We introduce the NERVE Attacks class, a systematic characterisation of five orthogonal attack dimensions that together span the complete BCI stack: Neuro-mimetic Forgery (N), Evasion via Desynchronization (E), Replay-based Hijacking (R), Vein Tapping (V), and Embedded Backdoors (E). To evaluate this class, we present EEGle, an AI-assisted extensible framework for systematic BCI security analysis. Our evaluation uncovers 17 novel neuro-specific attack instances and reveals a stealth-effectiveness spectrum unique to BCI backdoor design. We also show that generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for non-expert attackers and provide EEGle to the community for building and verifying the security of these deeply personal devices.

Let $q=3^n$, where $n>1$ is odd, and let $g:\Fq\to\Fq$ be a perfect nonlinear (PN) function represented by a Dembowski--Ostrom (DO) polynomial. Put $τ=g(1)$, let $ε$ be the indicator of $\Fthree^*$, and, for $c\in\Fq$, define $\widetilde G_c(x):=g(x+c)+τε(x)$. We prove that every $\widetilde G_c$ is APN and has boomerang uniformity either one or two. More precisely, \[ β_{\widetilde G_c}=1 \quad\Longleftrightarrow\quad c\in\mathcal C_g :=\{c\in\Fq\setminus\Fthree:g(c)+τ\notin g(\Fq)\}, \qquad |\mathcal C_g|=\frac{q-3}{2}, \] whereas $β_{\widetilde G_c}=2$ for the remaining $(q+3)/2$ parameters. We determine the common differential spectrum and complete boomerang spectra of all the functions $\widetilde G_c$. Since boomerang uniformity one is the least possible for an APN function over a finite field of odd characteristic, this gives, to the best of our knowledge, the first general construction yielding infinite families of APN functions attaining this optimum. This common differential spectrum rules out CCZ equivalence with every power function and every Ness--Helleseth-type binomial. We also prove that CCZ equivalence between sign-switches of DO PN functions forces EA equivalence between the original PN functions. Using the orders of the nuclei of the associated presemifields, we exhibit, for infinitely many odd $n$, three pairwise CCZ-inequivalent PN functions over $\F_{3^n}$, one from each of the Gold $f_1$, Ding--Yuan $f_3$, and Bierbrauer $f_5$ families. Consequently, over each such field, our construction produces three pairwise CCZ-inequivalent APN functions with boomerang uniformity one. The smallest extension degree obtained in this way is $n=45$.

As GPUs become increasingly integral to high-performance computing and machine learning, ensuring memory safety in GPU programs has become crucial for reliable and secure execution. However, evaluating GPU memory safety techniques remains challenging due to the lack of comprehensive and standardized benchmarks. In this paper, we present GMSBench, a GPU memory safety benchmark designed to evaluate a broad range of memory safety violations across different GPU memory spaces and execution scenarios. GMSBench comprises 149 self-contained CUDA tests spanning spatial, temporal, and concurrency errors. The suite provides a standardized foundation for the evaluation and comparative analysis of GPU memory safety mechanisms and helps expose gaps in their detection coverage. We demonstrate the utility of GMSBench by evaluating Compute Sanitizer, a widely used GPU memory error detection tool across multiple GPU architectures.

This paper proposes an innovative dual-polarized backscattering rectenna that operates in two distinct modesenergy harvesting and backscattering modulation-driven by two-bit digital control signals. By utilizing two orthogonal (co-and cross-) polarizations, the design represents a versatile candidate for IoT applications such as battery-free wireless sensing, identification, localization, and communication. The rectenna's dual functionality is validated through its integration into a proofof-concept battery-free wireless sensor, where it operates both as an energy harvester and as a dual-polarized backscattering modulator. As a proof of concept, a 16-byte AES-128 encrypted payload is backscattered over the wireless power transfer link to enhance the resilience of a battery-free Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless sensor against replay, relay, and eavesdropping attacks.

Software supply chain security has become increasingly critical due to the widespread reliance on third-party dependencies and the growing attack surface of modern software ecosystems. However, existing quantitative, measurement-based analysis and vulnerability management approaches remain largely fragmented and ecosystem-specific, limiting their ability to provide comparable risk assessments across environments. This paper presents a structured research plan, starting with a Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) to synthesize the current state of research and identify key gaps, highlighting the limitations in dependency modeling and vulnerability propagation analysis, particularly in the treatment of transitive dependencies and their real-world exploitability. Based on these insights, we argue for a unified measurement perspective capable of consistently representing and analyzing the cross-ecosystem dependency structure. We further identify emerging challenges introduced by AI-assisted software development, where coding LLMs are likely to contribute to new dependency patterns that are not captured by traditional Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools. These shifts motivate a rethink of dependency modeling to account for evolving software-generation practices and their long-term structural impact on software security.

Threat hunting increasingly depends on converting unstructured knowledge (e.g., Cyber Threat Intelligence reports) into actionable hunt leads: concise, investigable hypotheses grounded in observable artifacts and adversary techniques. Producing such leads manually is a tedious and hard-to-scale task. Existing automated approaches stop at the entity layer, ignore the defender's operational environment, and analyze each report in isolation. To address these gaps, we introduce AHLERT, a system that automatically extracts relevant, environment-aware, and hunt leads from threat reports through (i) a hybrid retriever that combines dense vector search with multi-hop traversal over a knowledge graph seeded with MITRE ATT&CK; (ii) an ontology-grounding retrieval-augmented generation method that constrains each lead to the defender's own assets and controls; and (iii) an LLM-agnostic framework that emits structured, directly actionable leads rather than loose indicators of compromise. We evaluate AHLERT on public CTI reports for well-known APTs across multiple proprietary and open-weight models. Hybrid evidence retrieval with ontology grounding raises mean F1 by ~2x (0.44 to 0.85) over a single-route flat-RAG baseline, and AHLERT attains the highest effectiveness score (~86.95%) compared with off-the-shelf LLM models.

Large language model (LLM) benchmarks are often treated as fixed datasets with stable scores, yet their outcomes depend on configurable evaluation pipelines. We audit eight cybersecurity benchmarks across 10 proprietary, open-weight, and cybersecurity-specialized LLMs. By modeling benchmarks as measurement pipelines, we identify 15 systematic failure modes and show that a single pipeline choice can change a model's score by more than 80 percentage points and substantially alter model rankings. At the cross-benchmark level, two semantically similar task pairs rank the same models differently because of incompatible evaluation conventions. Under an evaluation harness that standardizes pipeline choices while preserving task semantics, nine of 10 models shift by at least three ranks on at least one benchmark. These results show that cybersecurity LLM benchmark scores are pipeline-dependent and motivate pipeline-aware auditing as a core requirement for reliable model evaluation.

Federated global navigation satellite system (GNSS) monitoring distributes a proprietary classifier to partly trusted stations, any of which may leak its copy. ZK-Trace combines public identity marks, recipient-specific Tardos fingerprints, and zero-knowledge credential verification. The registry supports offline tracing without the leaker's cooperation. We establish conditional false-accusation bounds for arbitrary recovered bit patterns, a finite completeness bound under a hidden-bias residual channel, and a deterministic tracing-score bound for correlated feature-distillation errors. An interval-arithmetic checker makes the conditional bound executable and allocates a common budget across accusation and tamper decisions. Under innocent-row independence, the certificate-based evaluation uses a false-naming budget of 0.001 per investigation. It isolates all 160 single-owner copies and traces 712 of 720 two-owner mixtures without naming an innocent. Experiments use a simulated GNSS federation and CIFAR-10. Feature matching preserves the feature mark in 20/20 runs and cross-architecture transfer in 19/20, at copy-accuracy costs of 4.8 and 6.1 percentage points on GNSS and CIFAR-10. Function-only distillation erases the feature mark, and distillation also removes weight-space marks. These results support verifiable tracing under explicit statistical and cryptographic assumptions. Credential knowledge and recipient evidence serve distinct roles.

Agentic AI systems with persistent memory introduce a distinct attack surface known as memory poisoning, in which adversarially crafted content is stored in long-term memory and subsequently influences future agent behavior. Such attacks can suppress security alerts, facilitate privilege escalation, alter trust relationships, or override security policies without modifying the underlying model weights or system prompts. To address this threat, we present MemSentry, a formal, configuration-driven framework that intercepts proposed persistent-memory writes and produces deterministic Accept, Review, or Quarantine decisions. MemSentry evaluates each write by jointly considering source trust, semantic risk, attack radius over a component-dependency DAG, access risk, and a signed security-state delta that captures whether an operation weakens or strengthens the system's security posture. We instantiate the protected environment using a 20-asset random dependency DAG and a 10 x 20 user access-control matrix, and evaluate the framework over 1,000 GPT-4-generated scenarios using a stratified 70/30 train/test split. Semantic classification is treated as a pluggable component rather than a primary contribution, and we compare four representative approaches: rule-based Regex, TF-IDF+SVM, SBERT+LR, and SetFit. SBERT+LR achieves the best overall performance with 91.7% accuracy and a 0.908 macro-F1 score, while all four methods detect 100% of external quarantine-class threats. For verified insiders, where source trust is maximal (T = 1), MemSentry does not automatically quarantine suspicious operations but instead escalates potentially dangerous writes for human review, making semantic classification important for accurately capturing insider intent.

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) are critical for cybersecurity, safeguarding services and data from potential attacks. However, existing AI-based NIDS often assume static data distributions and fail to handle concept drift, leading to degraded performance and increased false positives in dynamic network environments. To address this issue, we propose DriftXpert, a novel NIDS for drift-adaptive detection. Specifically, we propose a decoupled two-stage offline adaptive framework. In Phase 1, we introduce an unsupervised anomaly metric based on latent manifold deviation. By performing outlier analysis within the latent space, the framework achieves high-sensitivity detection of network traffic concept drift. In Phase 2, to mitigate catastrophic forgetting under non-stationary distributions, we design a representation consistency alignment strategy. This strategy constrains the feature mapping between the legacy model and the drifted distribution, ensuring the model captures emerging attack characteristics while retaining discriminative power over known patterns. Furthermore, we incorporate cross-epoch neuron weight aggregation and selective freezing mechanisms to enable fine-grained knowledge transfer in the parameter space, effectively balancing model plasticity and stability. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that DriftXpert effectively adapts to drifted data without catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, real-world evaluations on enterprise network further confirm its robustness and practical applicability, contributing to improved security protection for millions of users.

Agentic AI systems increasingly exchange messages, invoke tools, request approvals, hold structured decision sessions, and modify shared artifacts. Logs and anchors can make selected records tamper-evident, but they can also mislead if their evidentiary meaning is implicit: a hash does not establish semantic truth, a signature does not establish authorization, and an external anchor does not establish capture completeness. This paper proposes an evidence claim model for agentic processes. It distinguishes artifact integrity, temporal existence, provenance, approval evidence, declared ordering, capture claim, relevance claim, deliberation traceability, monitoring claim, anchoring authorization claim, policy assessment claim, risk treatment claim, mitigation implementation claim, and management response claim. Semantic validity is treated as a recurring limitation. The model maps these claims to mechanisms, assumptions, limitations, and threats, and situates them in an agent organization with functional CEO agent, executive, operational, evidence, and audit roles, plus a plan-do-check-act-inspired management response loop. The contribution is conceptual: it does not validate a particular implementation, prevent all failures, or automate legal compliance. It provides a vocabulary for stating which claims an agentic black box can support, which claims it cannot establish, and which controls are required around it.

Secure Aggregation (SA) is widely regarded as a strong defense against model-update leakage in Federated Learning (FL), as it reveals only aggregate results while hiding individual updates. In Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL), SA is commonly instantiated as local neighborhood aggregation, where each node obtains a weighted aggregate over its neighbors. We show that this locality creates a structural leakage surface: sparse decentralized topologies provide colluding semi-honest nodes with asymmetric aggregate views, exposing multiple hidden linear combinations of honest participants' private states. Reconstructing private states from these aggregate views is fundamentally challenging, as both the private states and the aggregation coefficients are hidden. We tackle this challenge by establishing a formal connection to the Hidden Subset Sum Problem, a long-studied problem in cryptography. Building on this formulation, we design a lattice-based reconstruction approach that combines lattice reduction with structural filtering to reconstruct protected model states. We evaluate our attack on image, tabular, and text tasks under sparse DFL topologies. Our results show that colluding semi-honest nodes can recover the original local updates of honest nodes, enabling downstream reconstruction of private training data. These findings demonstrate that SA alone does not guarantee privacy in DFL when local aggregation induces asymmetric observations.

Working entirely on topologically anonymized embeddings, we perform fraud detection using iterative rounds of unsupervised filtering followed by supervised sniping. The result is an ultra-low latency privacy--preserving triage that allows institutions to flag suspicious activity without compromising Personally Identifiable Information.

Industrial Windows malware detectors are commonly described as Compound AI Systems composed of multiple heterogeneous components, including rule-based mechanisms as well as machine-learning-based static and dynamic analyses. However, due to industrial secrecy and limited public disclosure, the internal architectures of these systems can only be inferred, rendering systematic evaluations of detection accuracy, computational costs, and adversarial robustness largely infeasible. In contrast, academic research provides reproducible and transparent evaluation methodologies, but typically investigates individual detection components in isolation. To bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice, and inspired by state-of-the-art industrial architectures for Windows malware detection, we propose a novel methodology that (i) explicitly balances the trade-off among detection performance, computational requirements, and robustness, and introduces (ii) system-level threat models that capture how attackers exploit different degrees of knowledge to evade the entire Compound AI System rather than isolated detectors. Experiments conducted on real-world data demonstrate that the Compound AI System training time can be reduced and responsiveness improved while incurring only a marginal loss in detection performance. Leveraging our threat modeling, we show that increasingly knowledgeable attackers craft more effective adversarial examples, revealing the system's strengths and weaknesses, degrading its responsiveness, and exposing a direct trade-off between efficiency and robustness. Finally, we translate these trade-offs into take-home messages and deployment guidelines, helping practitioners to select the system that best matches their operational constraints.

Aligned language models fail under two independent pressures: the structural jailbreak class recently formalized as Involuntary In-Context Learning (IICL), which reframes a harmful request as the final missing cell of a data-labeling task completed by pattern rather than judged as content; and the erosion of safety alignment outside English. A natural hypothesis is that these compound. We test it directly. Using a deterministic IICL operator and a StrongREJECT-style rubric judge, we red-team two Google Gemini models on two benchmarks, a 30 general-harm behaviours from HarmBench and 30 financial-abuse behaviours from FinProof, each under a single-shot baseline and under IICL in four languages (English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic). First, IICL generalizes to a second provider and is worse in finance: it lifts attack success from <=6.7% to 80-90% on HarmBench and 97-100% on FinProof, an order of magnitude above the <=24% its introducing study reported on OpenAI's GPT-5.4. Second, against the hypothesis, forcing the IICL output into a non-English language does not stack the two weaknesses, it attenuates the attack. Eleven of twelve non-English conditions score below their English baseline (sign test, p~0.003), the lone exception a ceiling tie near 100%; on the stronger model's financial set Arabic collapses from 100% to 33%. We attribute this to a relevance curse: once structure has unlocked compliance, the models produce lower-quality harmful content in lower-resource languages, which a substance-grading judge scores as partial. The pattern replicates under an independent non-Google judge (Cohen's kappa=0.86, 377 paired verdicts), and 76.6% of non-English responses were verified in-language. Jailbreak vulnerabilities are therefore not additive; the dominant residual risk is the English structural attack, most acute for financial abuse, not a multilingual one.

World models take multimodal inputs like text, photos, and diagrams to generate dynamic scenes in accordance with the laws of physics, thus opening a compelling application: fusing multimodal legal evidence to re-create a crime scene and re-enact how an offence could have been committed. However, feeding the raw, unorganized evidence into a world model fails in forensic use: it silently drops evidence, glosses over contradictory testimony, and produces motion that violates the evidentiary record. This paper presents VeriScene, an agent that orchestrates the world model: it reconstructs crime scenes from forensic photographs and witness statements of varying reliability, keeping every claim traceable to evidence and every motion physically plausible. VeriScene iteratively fuses the evidence into a cited narrative under an auditing loop, verifies the hypothesized dynamics via probe rollouts in the world model with corrective constraint injection, and renders the offence as a re-enactment video from a fused keyframe. On a benchmark of 25 crime scenarios across 7 physically-driven case types (139 forensic-style photographs and 65 statements with planted unreliability), VeriScene attains 0.9014 evidence coverage and 0.7217 factual consistency (0-1 scale) on the 20 test scenes, outperforming an end-to-end multimodal-LLM baseline by 20.35% in factual consistency and 34.88% in temporal coherence, while generalizing across four LLM orchestration backends at USD 1.82 per scene.

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications such as content moderation and video analytics. To process long videos efficiently, VideoLLMs rely on frame sampling, token compression, and modality fusion, which together form an observation pipeline that reduces the raw video to a compact internal representation. Recent observation-level attacks exploit this pipeline to prevent the model from perceiving harmful content, yet no defense has been explicitly designed for this threat. We introduce DefTEval, a controlled evaluation framework that systematically assesses whether input-level adversarial defenses, which operate on the pixel content of already-sampled frames, can mitigate observation-level attacks. Across five VideoLLMs, eleven representative defenses, and five attack types, we find that input-level defenses offer limited and inconsistent protection, with harmful detection rates frequently near zero. Critically, defenses fail even against attacks that embed harmful signals in every sampled frame, indicating that the bottleneck extends beyond sampling omission to the suppression of signals that do enter the model. Token compression discards localized features, and modality fusion systematically down-weights weakened visual signals. Furthermore, defense effectiveness is dominated by model architecture rather than by the defense method itself, and detection rates vary drastically across content categories, exposing structural weaknesses in temporal reasoning. These findings demonstrate that securing VideoLLMs requires system-level robustness mechanisms spanning sampling-aware coverage guarantees, token-level preservation of safety-relevant features, and modality-balanced fusion.