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Computer Science Cryptography and Security

cs.CR Watch Cryptography and Security

Thursday 4 December

Cryptography and Security

A Practical Honeypot-Based Threat Intelligence Framework for Cyber Defence in the Cloud

Darren Malvern Chin, Bilal Isfaq and Simon Yusuf Enoch

In cloud environments, conventional firewalls rely on predefined rules and manual configurations, limiting their ability to respond effectively to evolving or zero-day threats. As organizations increasingly adopt platforms such as Microsoft Azure, this static defense model exposes cloud assets to zero-day exploits, botnets, and advanced persistent threats. In this paper, we introduce an automated defense framework that leverages medium- to high-interaction honeypot telemetry to dynamically update firewall rules in real time. The framework integrates deception sensors (Cowrie), Azure-native automation tools (Monitor, Sentinel, Logic Apps), and MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detection within a closed-loop feedback mechanism. We developed a testbed to automatically observe adversary tactics, classify them using the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and mitigate network-level threats automatically with minimal human intervention. To assess the framework's effectiveness, we defined and applied a set of attack- and defense-oriented security metrics. Building on existing adaptive defense strategies, our solution extends automated capabilities into cloud-native environments. The experimental results show an average Mean Time to Block of 0.86 seconds - significantly faster than benchmark systems - while accurately classifying over 12,000 SSH attempts across multiple MITRE ATT&CK tactics. These findings demonstrate that integrating deception telemetry with Azure-native automation reduces attacker dwell time, enhances SOC visibility, and provides a scalable, actionable defense model for modern cloud infrastructures.
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Cryptography and Security

Beyond Detection: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Study on Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Webshell Family Classification

Feijiang Han

Malicious WebShells pose a significant and evolving threat by compromising critical digital infrastructures and endangering public services in sectors such as healthcare and finance. While the research community has made significant progress in WebShell detection (i.e., distinguishing malicious samples from benign ones), we argue that it is time to transition from passive detection to in-depth analysis and proactive defense. One promising direction is the automation of WebShell family classification, which involves identifying the specific malware lineage in order to understand an adversary's tactics and enable a precise, rapid response. This crucial task, however, remains a largely unexplored area that currently relies on slow, manual expert analysis. To address this gap, we present the first systematic study to automate WebShell family classification. Our method begins with extracting dynamic function call traces to capture inherent behaviors that are resistant to common encryption and obfuscation. To enhance the scale and diversity of our dataset for a more stable evaluation, we augment these real-world traces with new variants synthesized by Large Language Models. These augmented traces are then abstracted into sequences, graphs, and trees, providing a foundation to benchmark a comprehensive suite of representation methods. Our evaluation spans classic sequence-based embeddings (CBOW, GloVe), transformers (BERT, SimCSE), and a range of structure-aware algorithms, including Graph Kernels, Graph Edit Distance, Graph2Vec, and various Graph Neural Networks. Through extensive experiments on four real-world, family-annotated datasets under both supervised and unsupervised settings, we establish a robust baseline and provide practical insights into the most effective combinations of data abstractions, representation models, and learning paradigms for this challenge.
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Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Autoencoders for Unsupervised Network Intrusion Detection

Mohammad Arif Rasyidi, Omar Alhussein, Sami Muhaidat et al. (+1 more)

Unsupervised anomaly-based intrusion detection requires models that can generalize to attack patterns not observed during training. This work presents the first large-scale evaluation of hybrid quantum-classical (HQC) autoencoders for this task. We construct a unified experimental framework that iterates over key quantum design choices, including quantum-layer placement, measurement approach, variational and non-variational formulations, and latent-space regularization. Experiments across three benchmark NIDS datasets show that HQC autoencoders can match or exceed classical performance in their best configurations, although they exhibit higher sensitivity to architectural decisions. Under zero-day evaluation, well-configured HQC models provide stronger and more stable generalization than classical and supervised baselines. Simulated gate-noise experiments reveal early performance degradation, indicating the need for noise-aware HQC designs. These results provide the first data-driven characterization of HQC autoencoder behavior for network intrusion detection and outline key factors that govern their practical viability. All experiment code and configurations are available at https://github.com/arasyi/hqcae-network-intrusion-detection.
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All authors Mohammad Arif Rasyidi, Omar Alhussein, Sami Muhaidat, Ernesto Damiani

Cryptography and Security

Personalizing Agent Privacy Decisions via Logical Entailment

James Flemings, Ren Yi, Octavian Suciu et al. (+3 more)

Personal large language model (LLM) agents increasingly perform tasks that require access to user data, raising concerns about appropriate data disclosure. We show that relying solely on LLMs to make data-sharing decisions is insufficient. Prompting LLMs with general privacy norms fails to capture individual users' privacy preferences, while providing prior user data-sharing decisions through in-context learning (ICL) leads to unreliable and opaque reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose ARIEL (Agentic Reasoning with Individualized Entailment Logic), a framework that combines LLMs with rule-based logic to enable structured, personalized privacy reasoning. The core mechanism of ARIEL determines whether a user's prior decision on a data-sharing request $\textit{logically entails}$ the same decision for a new request. Experimental evaluations using advanced models and public datasets show that ARIEL reduces the F1 error rate for appropriate judgments by $\textbf{40.6%}$ compared to standard ICL-based reasoning, indicating that ARIEL is effective at correctly judging requests where the user would approve data sharing. These results demonstrate that integrating LLMs with logical entailment provides an effective and interpretable approach for automating personalized privacy decisions.
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All authors James Flemings, Ren Yi, Octavian Suciu, Kassem Fawaz, Murali Annavaram, Marco Gruteser

Cryptography and Security

Opacity problems in multi-energy timed automata

Étienne André and Lydia Bakiri

Cyber-physical systems can be subject to information leakage; in the presence of continuous variables such as time and energy, these leaks can be subtle to detect. We study here the verification of opacity problems over systems with observation over both timing and energy information. We introduce guarded multi-energy timed automata as an extension of timed automata with multiple energy variables and guards over such variables. Despite undecidability of this general formalism, we establish positive results over a number of subclasses, notably when the attacker observes the final energy and/or the execution time, but also when they have access to the value of the energy variables every time unit.
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Cryptography and Security

Logic-Driven Cybersecurity: A Novel Framework for System Log Anomaly Detection using Answer Set Programming

Fang Li, Fei Zuo and Gopal Gupta

This study explores the application of Answer Set Programming (ASP) for detecting anomalies in system logs, addressing the challenges posed by evolving cyber threats. We propose a novel framework that leverages ASP's declarative nature and logical reasoning capabilities to encode complex security rules as logical predicates. Our ASP-based system was applied to a real-world Linux system log dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying various anomalies such as potential brute-force attacks, privilege escalations, frequent network connections from specific IPs, and various system-level issues. Key findings highlight ASP's strengths in handling structured log data, rule flexibility, and event correlation. The approach shows promise in providing explainable alerts from real-world data. This research contributes to computer forensics by demonstrating a logic-based paradigm for log analysis on a practical dataset, opening avenues for more nuanced and adaptive cyber intelligence systems.
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Cryptography and Security

A Novel Trust-Based DDoS Cyberattack Detection Model for Smart Business Environments

Oghenetejiri Okporokpo, Funminiyi Olajide, Nemitari Ajienka et al. (+1 more)

As the frequency and complexity of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to increase, the level of threats posed to Smart Internet of Things (SIoT) business environments have also increased. These environments generally have several interconnected SIoT systems and devices that are integral to daily operations, usually depending on cloud infrastructure and real-time data analytics, which require continuous availability and secure data exchange. Conventional detection mechanisms, while useful in static or traditional network environments, often are inadequate in responding to the needs of these dynamic and diverse SIoT networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel trust-based DDoS detection model tailored to meet the unique requirements of smart business environments. The proposed model incorporates a trust evaluation engine that continuously monitors node behaviour, calculating trust scores based on packet delivery ratio, response time, and anomaly detection. These trust metrics are then aggregated by a central trust-based repository that uses inherent trust values to identify traffic patterns indicative of DDoS attacks. By integrating both trust scores and central trust-based outputs, the trust calculation is enhanced, ensuring that threats are accurately identified and addressed in real-time. The model demonstrated a significant improvement in detection accuracy, and a low false-positive rate with enhanced scalability and adaptability under TCP SYN, Ping Flood, and UDP Flood attacks. The results show that a trust-based approach provides an effective, lightweight alternative for securing resource-constrained business IoT environments.
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All authors Oghenetejiri Okporokpo, Funminiyi Olajide, Nemitari Ajienka, Xiaoqi Ma

Cryptography and Security

SoK: a Comprehensive Causality Analysis Framework for Large Language Model Security

Wei Zhao, Zhe Li and Jun Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations such as jailbreaking, where crafted prompts bypass safety mechanisms. Understanding the causal factors behind such vulnerabilities is essential for building reliable defenses. In this work, we introduce a unified causality analysis framework that systematically supports all levels of causal investigation in LLMs, ranging from token-level, neuron-level, and layer-level interventions to representation-level analysis. The framework enables consistent experimentation and comparison across diverse causality-based attack and defense methods. Accompanying this implementation, we provide the first comprehensive survey of causality-driven jailbreak studies and empirically evaluate the framework on multiple open-weight models and safety-critical benchmarks including jailbreaks, hallucination detection, backdoor identification, and fairness evaluation. Our results reveal that: (1) targeted interventions on causally critical components can reliably modify safety behavior; (2) safety-related mechanisms are highly localized (i.e., concentrated in early-to-middle layers with only 1–2% of neurons exhibiting causal influence); and (3) causal features extracted from our framework achieve over 95% detection accuracy across multiple threat types. By bridging theoretical causality analysis and practical model safety, our framework establishes a reproducible foundation for research on causality-based attacks, interpretability, and robust attack detection and mitigation in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Amadeuszhao/SOK_Casuality.
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Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.AI

ASTRIDE: A Security Threat Modeling Platform for Agentic-AI Applications

Eranga Bandara, Amin Hass, Ross Gore et al. (+8 more)

AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.
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All authors Eranga Bandara, Amin Hass, Ross Gore, Sachin Shetty, Ravi Mukkamala, Safdar H. Bouk, Xueping Liang, Ng Wee Keong, Kasun De Zoysa, Aruna Withanage, Nilaan Loganathan

Cryptography and Security

Cryptanalysis of Gleeok-128

Siwei Chen, Peipei Xie, Shengyuan Xu et al. (+3 more)

Gleeok is a family of low latency keyed pseudorandom functions (PRFs) consisting of three parallel SPN based permutations whose outputs are XORed to form the final value. Both Gleeok-128 and Gleeok-256 use a 256 bit key, with block sizes of 128 and 256 bits, respectively. Owing to its multi branch structure, evaluating security margins and mounting effective key recovery attacks present nontrivial challenges. This paper provides the first comprehensive third party cryptanalysis of Gleeok-128. We introduce a two stage MILP based framework for constructing branch wise and full cipher differential linear (DL) distinguishers, together with an integral based key recovery framework tailored to multi branch designs. Our DL analysis yields 7, 7, 8, and 4 round distinguishers for Branch 1, Branch 2, Branch 3, and Gleeok-128, respectively, with squared correlations approximately 2 to the power minus 88.12, 2 to the power minus 88.12, 2 to the power minus 38.73, and 2 to the power minus 49.04, outperforming those in the design document except for the full PRF case. By tightening algebraic degree bounds, we further derive 9, 9, and 7 round integral distinguishers for the three branches and a 7 round distinguisher for the full PRF, extending the designers results by 3, 3, and 2 rounds and by 2 rounds, respectively. These integral properties enable 7 round and 8 round key recovery attacks in the non full codebook and full codebook settings. In addition, we identify a flaw in the original linear security evaluation of Branch 3, showing that it can be distinguished over all 12 rounds with data complexity about 2 to the power 48. We also propose optimized linear layer parameters that significantly improve linear resistance without sacrificing diffusion. Our results advance the understanding of Gleeok-128 and provide general methods for analyzing multi branch symmetric designs.
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All authors Siwei Chen, Peipei Xie, Shengyuan Xu, Xiutao Feng, Zejun Xiang, Xiangyong Zeng

Cryptography and Security

Topology Matters: Measuring Memory Leakage in Multi-Agent LLMs

Jinbo Liu, Defu Cao, Yifei Wei et al. (+6 more)

Graph topology is a fundamental determinant of memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems, yet its effects remain poorly quantified. We introduce MAMA (Multi-Agent Memory Attack), a controlled evaluation framework for comparing topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. MAMA operates on synthetic documents containing labeled Personally Identifiable Information (PII) entities, from which we generate sanitized task instructions. We execute a two-phase protocol: Engram (seeding private information into a target agent's memory) and Resonance (multi-round interaction where an attacker attempts extraction). Over 10 rounds, we measure leakage using a two-stage recovery criterion that combines exact-match extraction with LLM-based inference over the attacker's final output. We evaluate six canonical topologies (complete, circle, chain, tree, star, star-ring) across $n\in\{4,5,6\}$, attacker-target placements, and base models. Results are consistent: denser connectivity, shorter attacker-target distance, and higher target centrality increase leakage; most leakage occurs in early rounds and then plateaus; model choice shifts absolute rates but preserves broad structural trends; spatiotemporal/location attributes leak more readily than identity credentials or regulated identifiers. We distill practical guidance for system design: favor sparse or hierarchical connectivity, maximize attacker-target separation, and restrict hub/shortcut pathways via topology-aware access control. Our code is available at https://github.com/llll121/mama-eval.
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All authors Jinbo Liu, Defu Cao, Yifei Wei, Tianyao Su, Yuan Liang, Yushun Dong, Yan Liu, Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu

Cryptography and Security

PBFuzz: Agentic Directed Fuzzing for PoV Generation

Haochen Zeng, Andrew Bao, Jiajun Cheng et al. (+1 more)

Proof-of-Vulnerability (PoV) input generation is a critical task in software security and supports downstream applications such as bug reproduction and patch validation. Generating a PoV input requires solving two sets of constraints: (1) reachability constraints for reaching vulnerable code locations, and (2) triggering constraints for activating the target vulnerability. Existing approaches, including directed greybox fuzzing and LLM-assisted fuzzing, struggle to efficiently satisfy these constraints. This work presents an agentic method that mimics human experts. Human analysts iteratively study code to extract semantic reachability and triggering constraints, form hypotheses about PoV triggering strategies, encode them as test inputs, and refine their understanding using debugging feedback. We automate this process with an agentic directed fuzzing framework called PBFuzz. PBFuzz tackles four challenges in agentic PoV generation: autonomous code reasoning for semantic constraint extraction, custom program-analysis tools for targeted inference, persistent memory to avoid hypothesis drift, and property-based testing for efficient constraint solving while preserving input structure. Experiments on the Magma benchmark show strong results. PBFuzz triggered 57 vulnerabilities, surpassing all baselines, and uniquely triggered 17 vulnerabilities not exposed by existing fuzzers. PBFuzz achieved this within a 30-minute budget per target, whereas conventional approaches were allotted 24 hours. Median time-to-exposure was 339 seconds for PBFuzz versus 8,680 seconds for AFL++ with CmpLog, giving a 25.6x efficiency improvement with an API cost of 1.83 USD per vulnerability. In real-world applications, PBFuzz reproduced three FFmpeg 1-day CVEs that had no public PoVs and identified three previously unknown Bento4 vulnerabilities.
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All authors Haochen Zeng, Andrew Bao, Jiajun Cheng, Chengyu Song

Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Exploiting ftrace's function_graph Tracer Features for Machine Learning: A Case Study on Encryption Detection

Kenan Begovic, Abdulaziz Al-Ali and Qutaibah Malluhi

This paper proposes using the Linux kernel ftrace framework, particularly the function graph tracer, to generate informative system level data for machine learning (ML) applications. Experiments on a real world encryption detection task demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed features across several learning algorithms. The learner faces the problem of detecting encryption activities across a large dataset of files, using function call traces and graph based features. Empirical results highlight an outstanding accuracy of 99.28 on the task at hand, underscoring the efficacy of features derived from the function graph tracer. The results were further validated in an additional experiment targeting a multilabel classification problem, in which running programs were identified from trace data. This work provides comprehensive methodologies for preprocessing raw trace data and extracting graph based features, offering significant advancements in applying ML to system behavior analysis, program identification, and anomaly detection. By bridging the gap between system tracing and ML, this paper paves the way for innovative solutions in performance monitoring and security analytics.
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Cryptography and Security

CryptoTensors: A Light-Weight Large Language Model File Format for Highly-Secure Model Distribution

Huifeng Zhu, Shijie Li, Qinfeng Li et al. (+1 more)

To enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in various domain-specific applications, sensitive data such as healthcare, law, and finance are being used to privately customize or fine-tune these models. Such privately adapted LLMs are regarded as either personal privacy assets or corporate intellectual property. Therefore, protecting model weights and maintaining strict confidentiality during deployment and distribution have become critically important. However, existing model formats and deployment frameworks provide little to no built-in support for confidentiality, access control, or secure integration with trusted hardware. Current methods for securing model deployment either rely on computationally expensive cryptographic techniques or tightly controlled private infrastructure. Although these approaches can be effective in specific scenarios, they are difficult and costly for widespread deployment. In this paper, we introduce CryptoTensors, a secure and format-compatible file structure for confidential LLM distribution. Built as an extension to the widely adopted Safetensors format, CryptoTensors incorporates tensor-level encryption and embedded access control policies, while preserving critical features such as lazy loading and partial deserialization. It enables transparent decryption and automated key management, supporting flexible licensing and secure model execution with minimal overhead. We implement a proof-of-concept library, benchmark its performance across serialization and runtime scenarios, and validate its compatibility with existing inference frameworks, including Hugging Face Transformers and vLLM. Our results highlight CryptoTensors as a light-weight, efficient, and developer-friendly solution for safeguarding LLM weights in real-world and widespread deployments.
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All authors Huifeng Zhu, Shijie Li, Qinfeng Li, Yier Jin

Cryptography and Security

ReFuzz: Reusing Tests for Processor Fuzzing with Contextual Bandits

Chen Chen, Zaiyan Xu, Mohamadreza Rostami et al. (+4 more)

Processor designs rely on iterative modifications and reuse well-established designs. However, this reuse of prior designs also leads to similar vulnerabilities across multiple processors. As processors grow increasingly complex with iterative modifications, efficiently detecting vulnerabilities from modern processors is critical. Inspired by software fuzzing, hardware fuzzing has recently demonstrated its effectiveness in detecting processor vulnerabilities. Yet, to our best knowledge, existing processor fuzzers fuzz each design individually, lacking the capability to understand known vulnerabilities in prior processors to fine-tune fuzzing to identify similar or new variants of vulnerabilities. To address this gap, we present ReFuzz, an adaptive fuzzing framework that leverages contextual bandit to reuse highly effective tests from prior processors to fuzz a processor-under-test (PUT) within a given ISA. By intelligently mutating tests that trigger vulnerabilities in prior processors, ReFuzz effectively detects similar and new variants of vulnerabilities in PUTs. ReFuzz uncovered three new security vulnerabilities and two new functional bugs. ReFuzz detected one vulnerability by reusing a test that triggers a known vulnerability in a prior processor. One functional bug exists across three processors that share design modules. The second bug has two variants. Additionally, ReFuzz reuses highly effective tests to enhance efficiency in coverage, achieving an average 511.23x coverage speedup and up to 9.33% more total coverage, compared to existing fuzzers.
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All authors Chen Chen, Zaiyan Xu, Mohamadreza Rostami, David Liu, Dileep Kalathil, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Jeyavijayan Rajendran

Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Combined Quantum and Post-Quantum Security Performance Under Finite Keys

Aman Gupta, Ravi Singh Adhikari, Anju Rani et al. (+2 more)

Recent advances in quantum-secure communication have highlighted the value of hybrid schemes that combine Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Yet most existing hybrid designs omit realistic finite-key effects on QKD key rates and do not specify how to maintain security when both QKD and PQC primitives leak information through side-channels. These gaps limit the applicability of hybrid systems in practical, deployed networks. In this work, we advance a recently proposed hybrid QKD-PQC system by integrating tight finite-key security to the QKD primitive and improving the design for better scalability. This hybrid system employs an information-theoretically secure instruction sequence that determines the configurations of different primitives and thus ensures message confidentiality even when both the QKD and the PQC primitives are compromised. The novelty in our work lies in the implementation of the tightest finite-key security to date for the BBM92 protocol and the design improvements in the primitives of the hybrid system that ensure the processing time scales linearly with the size of secret instructions.
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All authors Aman Gupta, Ravi Singh Adhikari, Anju Rani, Xiaoyu Ai, Robert Malaney

Cryptography and Security

AutoGuard: A Self-Healing Proactive Security Layer for DevSecOps Pipelines Using Reinforcement Learning

Praveen Anugula, Avdhesh Kumar Bhardwaj, Navin Chhibber et al. (+3 more)

Contemporary DevSecOps pipelines have to deal with the evolution of security in an ever-continuously integrated and deployed environment. Existing methods,such as rule-based intrusion detection and static vulnerability scanning, are inadequate and unreceptive to changes in the system, causing longer response times and organization needs exposure to emerging attack vectors. In light of the previous constraints, we introduce AutoGuard to the DevSecOps ecosystem, a reinforcement learning (RL)-powered self-healing security framework built to pre-emptively protect DevSecOps environments. AutoGuard is a self-securing security environment that continuously observes pipeline activities for potential anomalies while preemptively remediating the environment. The model observes and reacts based on a policy that is continually learned dynamically over time. The RL agent improves each action over time through reward-based learning aimed at improving the agent's ability to prevent, detect and respond to a security incident in real-time. Testing using simulated ContinuousIntegration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) environments showed AutoGuard to successfully improve threat detection accuracy by 22%, reduce mean time torecovery (MTTR) for incidents by 38% and increase overall resilience to incidents as compared to traditional methods. Keywords- DevSecOps, Reinforcement Learning, Self- Healing Security, Continuous Integration, Automated Threat Mitigation
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All authors Praveen Anugula, Avdhesh Kumar Bhardwaj, Navin Chhibber, Rohit Tewari, Sunil Khemka, Piyush Ranjan

Wednesday 3 December

Cryptography and Security

Blockchain-Anchored Audit Trail Model for Transparent Inter-Operator Settlement

Balakumar Ravindranath Kunthu, Ranganath Nagesh Taware and Sathish Krishna Anumula

The telecommunications and financial services industries face substantial challenges in inter-operator settlement processes, characterized by extended reconciliation cycles, high transaction costs, and limited real-time transparency. Traditional settlement mechanisms rely on multiple intermediaries and manual procedures, resulting in settlement periods exceeding 120 days with operational costs consuming approximately 5 percent of total revenue. This research presents a blockchain-anchored audit trail model enabling transparent, immutable, and automated inter-operator settlement. The framework leverages distributed ledger technology, smart contract automation, and cryptographic verification to establish a unified, tamper-proof transaction record. Empirical evaluation demonstrates 87 percent reduction in transaction fees, settlement cycle compression from 120 days to 3 minutes, and 100 percent audit trail integrity. Smart contract automation reduces manual intervention by 92 percent and eliminates 88 percent of settlement disputes. Market analysis indicates institutional adoption accelerated from 8 percent in 2020 to 52 percent by April 2024, with projected industry investment reaching 9.2 billion USD annually. The framework addresses scalability (12,000 transactions per second), interoperability, and regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions.
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Cryptography and Security

One Detector Fits All: Robust and Adaptive Detection of Malicious Packages from PyPI to Enterprises

Biagio Montaruli, Luca Compagna, Serena Elisa Ponta et al. (+1 more)

The rise of supply chain attacks via malicious Python packages demands robust detection solutions. Current approaches, however, overlook two critical challenges: robustness against adversarial source code transformations and adaptability to the varying false positive rate (FPR) requirements of different actors, from repository maintainers (requiring low FPR) to enterprise security teams (higher FPR tolerance). We introduce a robust detector capable of seamless integration into both public repositories like PyPI and enterprise ecosystems. To ensure robustness, we propose a novel methodology for generating adversarial packages using fine-grained code obfuscation. Combining these with adversarial training (AT) enhances detector robustness by 2.5x. We comprehensively evaluate AT effectiveness by testing our detector against 122,398 packages collected daily from PyPI over 80 days, showing that AT needs careful application: it makes the detector more robust to obfuscations and allows finding 10% more obfuscated packages, but slightly decreases performance on non-obfuscated packages. We demonstrate production adaptability of our detector via two case studies: (i) one for PyPI maintainers (tuned at 0.1% FPR) and (ii) one for enterprise teams (tuned at 10% FPR). In the former, we analyze 91,949 packages collected from PyPI over 37 days, achieving a daily detection rate of 2.48 malicious packages with only 2.18 false positives. In the latter, we analyze 1,596 packages adopted by a multinational software company, obtaining only 1.24 false positives daily. These results show that our detector can be seamlessly integrated into both public repositories like PyPI and enterprise ecosystems, ensuring a very low time budget of a few minutes to review the false positives. Overall, we uncovered 346 malicious packages, now reported to the community.
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All authors Biagio Montaruli, Luca Compagna, Serena Elisa Ponta, Davide Balzarotti

Cryptography and Security

Breaking Isolation: A New Perspective on Hypervisor Exploitation via Cross-Domain Attacks

Gaoning Pan, Yiming Tao, Qinying Wang et al. (+4 more)

Hypervisors are under threat by critical memory safety vulnerabilities, with pointer corruption being one of the most prevalent and severe forms. Existing exploitation frameworks depend on identifying highly-constrained structures in the host machine and accurately determining their runtime addresses, which is ineffective in hypervisor environments where such structures are rare and further obfuscated by Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). We instead observe that modern virtualization environments exhibit weak memory isolation – guest memory is fully attacker-controlled yet accessible from the host, providing a reliable primitive for exploitation. Based on this observation, we present the first systematic characterization and taxonomy of Cross-Domain Attacks (CDA), a class of exploitation techniques that enable capability escalation through guest memory reuse. To automate this process, we develop a system that identifies cross-domain gadgets, matches them with corrupted pointers, synthesizes triggering inputs, and assembles complete exploit chains. Our evaluation on 15 real-world vulnerabilities across QEMU and VirtualBox shows that CDA is widely applicable and effective.
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All authors Gaoning Pan, Yiming Tao, Qinying Wang, Chunming Wu, Mingde Hu, Yizhi Ren, Shouling Ji

Cryptography and Security

WildCode Revisited: A Comprehensive Empirical Study on the Security of LLM-Generated Code

Kobra Khanmohammadi, Pooria Roy, Raphael Khoury et al. (+4 more)

LLM models are increasingly used to generate code, but the quality and security of this code are often uncertain. Several recent studies have raised alarm bells, indicating that such AI-generated code may be particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. However, most of these studies rely on code that is generated specifically for the study, which raises questions about the realism of such experiments. In this study, we perform a large-scale empirical analysis of real-life code generated by ChatGPT. We evaluate code generated by ChatGPT both with respect to correctness and security and delve into the intentions of users who request code from the model. We further performed an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of common prompt engineering strategies using real-life prompts. Our study supports earlier research that employed synthetic queries and produced proof that LLM-generated code is frequently insufficient in terms of security. Additionally, we observe that users don't ask many questions about the security characteristics of the code they ask LLMs to provide.
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All authors Kobra Khanmohammadi, Pooria Roy, Raphael Khoury, Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj, Wilfried Patrick Konan, Alexander Da Re, Nicholas Rebelo Melo

Cryptography and Security

Hey GPT-OSS, Looks Like You Got It – Now Walk Me Through It! An Assessment of the Reasoning Language Models Chain of Thought Mechanism for Digital Forensics

Gaëtan Michelet, Janine Schneider, Aruna Withanage et al. (+1 more)

The use of large language models in digital forensics has been widely explored. Beyond identifying potential applications, research has also focused on optimizing model performance for forensic tasks through fine-tuning. However, limited result explainability reduces their operational and legal usability. Recently, a new class of reasoning language models has emerged, designed to handle logic-based tasks through an `internal reasoning' mechanism. Yet, users typically see only the final answer, not the underlying reasoning. One of these reasoning models is gpt-oss, which can be deployed locally, providing full access to its underlying reasoning process. This article presents the first investigation into the potential of reasoning language models for digital forensics. Four test use cases are examined to assess the usability of the reasoning component in supporting result explainability. The evaluation combines a new quantitative metric with qualitative analysis. Findings show that the reasoning component aids in explaining and validating language model outputs in digital forensics at medium reasoning levels, but this support is often limited, and higher reasoning levels do not enhance response quality.
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All authors Gaëtan Michelet, Janine Schneider, Aruna Withanage, Frank Breitinger

Cryptography and Security

Primitive Vector Cipher(PVC): A Hybrid Encryption Scheme based on the Vector Computational Diffie-Hellman (V-CDH) Problem

Gülçin ÇİVİ BİLİR

This work introduces the Primitive Vector Cipher (PVC), a novel hybrid encryption scheme integrating matrix-based cryptography with advanced Diffie-Hellman key exchange. PVC's security is grounded on the established hardness of the Vector Computational Diffie- Hellman (V-CDH) problem. The two-layered design uses HKDF to mask plaintext via a DH-authenticated shared primitive vector and randomize cipher blocks with a per-block offset. This approach eliminates deterministic repetitions and provides strong resistance against linear and known-plaintext attacks. PVC's block-wise structure allows for massive parallelism and excellent linear scaling. Security is formally analyzed, demonstrating INDCPA security under V-CDH. STS protocol integration elevates security toward IND-CCA guarantees.
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Cryptography and Security

Don't Trust Your Upstream: Exploiting LLM Multi-Agent System via Topology-Guided Adversarial Propagation

Ruichao Liang, Le Yin, Jing Chen et al. (+6 more)

The digital world is witnessing the rapid rise of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) and their powerful applications. However, their security remains insufficiently understood, as existing evaluations are largely limited to narrow attack settings and may substantially underestimate the real risks of MAS deployments. Inspired by the MAS inter-agent dependencies, where upstream outputs are reinterpreted and executed by downstream agents, we propose a topology-aware attack scheme that propagates adversarial contamination from exposed edge agents to high-privilege agents to induce malicious behaviors. By combining topology reconnaissance, contamination propagation modeling, and hierarchical payload encapsulation, our approach overcomes the key challenges of black-box attacks and makes such multi-hop compromise practical. Experiments show that our approach achieves success rates of 40%–78% on three widely-used MAS frameworks under five topologies, and 85% on two real-world MAS applications across 20 representative scenarios. The results reveal fundamental vulnerabilities in MASs that have been overlooked by prior studies. Based on these findings, we propose a topology-trust mitigation that blocks 94.8% of such composite attacks.
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All authors Ruichao Liang, Le Yin, Jing Chen, Yebo Feng, Cong Wu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Huangpeng Gu, Zijian Zhang, Yang Liu

Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG

MarkTune: Improving the Quality-Detectability Trade-off in Model-Embedded LLM Watermarking

Yizhou Zhao, Zhiwei Steven Wu and Adam Block

Language model watermarking schemes fall into two broad categories: inference-time methods, which modify the decoding process at generation time, and model-embedded methods, which encode a secret signal directly into the model weights. Inference-time watermarking methods incur additional inference overhead and are not applicable in the increasingly prevalent open-weight model settings. In contrast, model-embedded watermarks introduce no additional inference latency-generation uses the standard sampling pipeline-and are particularly well-suited to open-weight settings. However, existing model-embedded approaches such as GaussMark face a fundamental quality-detectability trade-off: achieving strong detection power typically requires weight perturbations that noticeably degrade generation quality. Our key insight is that regularizing toward a high-quality reference distribution decouples quality preservation from proximity to the base model, enabling a better quality-detectability trade-off. Building on this insight, we introduce MarkTune, a theoretically grounded on-policy fine-tuning framework that uses the GaussMark detection statistic as a reward while preserving generation quality through cross-entropy on high-quality human text or KL divergence to a stronger oracle model. Empirically, MarkTune substantially improves the quality-detectability frontier of GaussMark, approaching the detectability of strong inference-time schemes while preserving generation quality and downstream task performance. Marktune also remains robust under the evaluated text-editing and open-weight attacks and generalizes across datasets, retaining substantial detection power on corpora unseen during training. Code is available at https://github.com/zhyzmath/MarkTune-LLM-Watermarking.
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Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Efficient Public Verification of Private ML via Regularization

Zoë Ruha Bell, Anvith Thudi, Olive Franzese-McLaughlin et al. (+2 more)

Training with differential privacy (DP) guarantees dataset members that they cannot be identified by users of the released model. However, those data providers, and, in general, the public, lack methods to efficiently verify that models trained on their data satisfy DP guarantees. The amount of compute needed to verify DP guarantees for current algorithms scales with the amount of computation required to train the model. In this paper we design the first DP algorithm with near optimal privacy-utility trade-offs but whose DP guarantees can be verified cheaper than training. We focus on DP stochastic convex optimization (DP-SCO), where optimal privacy-utility trade-offs are known. Here we show we can obtain tight privacy-utility trade-offs by privately minimizing a series of regularized objectives and only using the standard DP composition bound. Crucially, this method can be verified with much less compute than training. This leads to the first known DP-SCO algorithm with near optimal privacy-utility whose DP verification scales better than training cost, significantly reducing verification costs on large datasets.
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All authors Zoë Ruha Bell, Anvith Thudi, Olive Franzese-McLaughlin, Nicolas Papernot, Shafi Goldwasser

Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.SE

A Comprehensive Study on the Impact of Vulnerable Dependencies on Open-Source Software

Shree Hari Bittugondanahalli Indra Kumar, Lilia Rodrigues Sampaio, André Martin et al. (+2 more)

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source libraries, it becomes even more imperative to comprehend and address these dependency vulnerabilities. The use of Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools does greatly help here as they provide a deep insight on what dependencies are used in a project, enhancing the security and integrity in the software supply chain. In order to learn how wide spread vulnerabilities are and how quickly they are being fixed, we conducted a study on over 1k open-source software projects with about 50k releases comprising several languages such as Java, Python, Rust, Go, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript. Our objective is to investigate the severity, persistence, and distribution of these vulnerabilities, as well as their correlation with project metrics such as team and contributors size, activity and release cycles. In order to perform such analysis, we crawled over 1k projects from github including their version history ranging from 2013 to 2023 using VODA, our SCA tool. Using our approach, we can provide information such as library versions, dependency depth, and known vulnerabilities, and how they evolved over the software development cycle. Being larger and more diverse than datasets used in earlier works and studies, ours provides better insights and generalizability of the gained results. The data collected answers several research questions about the dependency depth and the average time a vulnerability persists. Among other findings, we observed that for most programming languages, vulnerable dependencies are transitive, and a critical vulnerability persists in average for over a year before being fixed.
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All authors Shree Hari Bittugondanahalli Indra Kumar, Lilia Rodrigues Sampaio, André Martin, Andrey Brito, Christof Fetzer

Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Log Probability Tracking of LLM APIs

Timothée Chauvin, Erwan Le Merrer, François Taïani et al. (+1 more)

When using an LLM through an API provider, users expect the served model to remain consistent over time, a property crucial for the reliability of downstream applications and the reproducibility of research. Existing audit methods are too costly to apply at regular time intervals to the wide range of available LLM APIs. This means that model updates are left largely unmonitored in practice. In this work, we show that while LLM log probabilities (logprobs) are usually non-deterministic, they can still be used as the basis for cost-effective continuous monitoring of LLM APIs. We apply a simple statistical test based on the average value of each token logprob, requesting only a single token of output. This is enough to detect changes as small as one step of fine-tuning, making this approach more sensitive than existing methods while being 1,000x cheaper. We introduce the TinyChange benchmark as a way to measure the sensitivity of audit methods in the context of small, realistic model changes.
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All authors Timothée Chauvin, Erwan Le Merrer, François Taïani, Gilles Tredan

Cryptography and Security

Unfolding Challenges in Securing and Regulating Unmanned Air Vehicles

Sonali Rout and Vireshwar Kumar

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are being introduced in a wide range of commercial applications. This has also made them prime targets of attackers who compromise their fundamental security properties, including confidentiality, integrity, and availability. As researchers discover novel threat vectors in UAVs, the government and industry are increasingly concerned about their limited ability to secure and regulate UAVs and their usage. With the aim of unfolding a path for a large-scale commercial UAV network deployment, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art study and examine the prevailing security challenges. Unlike the prior art, we focus on uncovering the research gaps that must be addressed to enforce security policy regulations in civilian off-the-shelf drone systems. To that end, we first examine the known security threats to UAVs based on their impact and effectiveness. We then analyze existing countermeasures to prevent, detect, and respond to these threats in terms of security and performance overhead. We further outline the future research directions for securing UAVs. Finally, we establish the fundamental requirements and highlight critical research challenges in introducing a regulatory entity to achieve a secure and regulated UAV network.
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Cryptography and Security

CCN: Decentralized Cross-Chain Channel Networks Supporting Secure and Privacy-Preserving Multi-Hop Interactions

Minghui Xu, Yihao Guo, Yanqiang Zhang et al. (+5 more)

Cross-chain technology enables interoperability among otherwise isolated blockchains, supporting interactions across heterogeneous networks. Similar to how multi-hop communication became fundamental in the evolution of the Internet, the demand for multi-hop cross-chain interactions is gaining increasing attention. However, this growing demand introduces new security and privacy challenges. On the security side, multi-hop interactions depend on the availability of multiple participating nodes. If any node becomes temporarily offline during execution, the protocol may fail to complete correctly, leading to settlement failure or fund loss. On the privacy side, the need for on-chain transparency to validate intermediate states may unintentionally leak linkable information, compromising the unlinkability of user interactions. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Chain Channel Network (CCN), a decentralized network designed to support secure and privacy-preserving multi-hop cross-chain transactions. Through experimental evaluation, we identify two critical types of offline failures, referred to as active and passive offline cases, which have not been adequately addressed by existing solutions. To mitigate these issues, we introduce R-HTLC, a core protocol within CCN. R-HTLC incorporates an hourglass mechanism and a multi-path refund strategy to ensure settlement correctness even when some nodes go offline during execution. Importantly, CCN addresses not only the correctness under offline conditions but also maintains unlinkability in such adversarial settings. To overcome this, CCN leverages zero-knowledge proofs and off-chain coordination, ensuring that interaction relationships remain indistinguishable even when certain nodes are temporarily offline.
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All authors Minghui Xu, Yihao Guo, Yanqiang Zhang, Zhiguang Shan, Guangyong Shang, Zhen Ma, Bin Xiao, Xiuzhen Cheng