Cryptography and Security
Cybersecurity Data Extraction from Common Crawl
Ashim Mahara
Alpha-Root is a cybersecurity-focused
dataset collected in a single shot from the Common Crawl web graph using community detection. Unlike iterative content-scoring approaches like DeepSeekMath, we mine quality domains directly from the web graph, starting from just 20 trusted seed domains.
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Cryptography and Security
Auto-Tuning Safety Guardrails for Black-Box Large Language Models
Perry Abdulkadir
Large
language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed behind safety guardrails such as system
prompts and content filters, especially in settings where product teams cannot modify model weights. In practice these guardrails are typically hand-tuned, brittle, and difficult to reproduce. This paper studies a simple but practical alternative: treat safety guardrail design itself as a hyperparameter optimization problem over a frozen base model. Concretely, I wrap Mistral-7B-Instruct with modular jailbreak and malware system
prompts plus a ModernBERT-based harmfulness classifier, then evaluate candidate configurations on three public
benchmarks covering malware generation, classic jailbreak
prompts, and benign user queries. Each configuration is scored using malware and jailbreak attack success rate, benign harmful-response rate, and end-to-end latency. A 48-point grid search over
prompt combinations and filter modes establishes a baseline. I then run a black-box Optuna study over the same space and show that it reliably rediscovers the best grid configurations while requiring an order of magnitude fewer evaluations and roughly 8x less wall-clock time. The results suggest that viewing safety guardrails as tunable hyperparameters is a feasible way to harden black-box LLM deployments under compute and time constraints.
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Cryptography and Security
Detecting Malicious Entra OAuth Apps with LLM-Based Permission Risk Scoring
Ashim Mahara
This project presents a unified detection framework that constructs a complete corpus of Microsoft Graph permissions, generates consistent LLM-based risk scores, and integrates them into a real-time detection engine to identify malicious OAuth consent activity.
Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Adversarial Robustness in Financial Machine Learning: Defenses, Economic Impact, and Governance Evidence
Samruddhi Baviskar
We evaluate
adversarial robustness in tabular machine learning models used in financial decision making. Using credit scoring and fraud detection data, we apply gradient based attacks and measure impacts on discrimination, calibration, and financial risk metrics. Results show notable performance degradation under small perturbations and partial recovery through
adversarial training.
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Cryptography and Security
Hyperparameter Tuning-Based Optimized Performance Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Network Intrusion Detection
Sudhanshu Sekhar Tripathy and Bichitrananda Behera
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are essential for securing networks by identifying and mitigating unauthorized activities indicative of cyberattacks. As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated, NIDS must evolve to detect both emerging threats and deviations from normal behavior. This study explores the application of machine learning (ML) methods to improve the NIDS accuracy through analyzing intricate structures in deep-featured network traffic records. Leveraging the 1999 KDD CUP intrusion
dataset as a
benchmark, this research evaluates and optimizes several ML
algorithms, including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naïve Bayes variants (MNB, BNB), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), Decision Trees (DT), AdaBoost, XGBoost, Logistic Regression (LR), Ridge Classifier, Passive-Aggressive (PA) Classifier, Rocchio Classifier, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Perceptron (PPN). Initial evaluations without hyper-parameter optimization demonstrated suboptimal performance, highlighting the importance of tuning to enhance classification accuracy. After hyper-parameter optimization using grid and random search techniques, the SVM classifier achieved 99.12% accuracy with a 0.0091 False Alarm Rate (FAR), outperforming its default configuration (98.08% accuracy, 0.0123 FAR) and all other classifiers. This result confirms that SVM accomplishes the highest accuracy among the evaluated classifiers. We validated the effectiveness of all classifiers using a tenfold cross-validation approach, incorporating Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) for feature selection to enhance the classifiers accuracy and efficiency. Our outcomes indicate that ML classifiers are both adaptable and reliable, contributing to enhanced accuracy in systems for detecting network intrusions.
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Cryptography and Security
COBRA: Catastrophic Bit-flip Reliability Analysis of State-Space Models
Sanjay Das, Swastik Bhattacharya, Shamik Kundu et al. (+3 more)
State-space models (SSMs), exemplified by the Mamba architecture, have recently emerged as state-of-the-art sequence-modeling frameworks, offering linear-time scalability together with strong performance in long-context settings. Owing to their unique combination of efficiency, scalability, and expressive capacity, SSMs have become compelling alternatives to
transformer-based models, which suffer from the quadratic computational and
memory costs of
attention mechanisms. As SSMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is critical to assess their susceptibility to both software- and hardware-level threats to ensure secure and reliable operation. Among such threats, hardware-induced bit-flip attacks (BFAs) pose a particularly severe risk by corrupting model parameters through
memory faults, thereby undermining model accuracy and functional integrity. To investigate this vulnerability, we introduce RAMBO, the first BFA framework specifically designed to target Mamba-based architectures. Through experiments on the Mamba-1.4b model with LAMBADA
benchmark, a cloze-style word-prediction task, we demonstrate that flipping merely a single critical bit can catastrophically reduce accuracy from 74.64% to 0% and increase perplexity from 18.94 to 3.75 x 10^6. These results demonstrate the pronounced fragility of SSMs to
adversarial perturbations.
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All authors Sanjay Das, Swastik Bhattacharya, Shamik Kundu, Arnab Raha, Souvik Kundu, Kanad Basu
Cryptography and Security
Variable Record Table: A Unified Hardware-Assisted Framework for Runtime Security
Suraj Kumar Sah and Love Kumar Sah
Modern computing systems face security threats, including
memory corruption attacks, speculative execution vulnerabilities, and control-flow hijacking. Although existing solutions address these threats individually, they frequently introduce performance overhead and leave security gaps. This paper presents a Variable Record Table (VRT) with a unified hardware-assisted framework that simultaneously enforces spatial
memory safety against buffer overflows, back-edge control-flow integrity (CFI), and speculative execution attack detection. The VRT dynamically constructs a protection table by instrumenting run-time instructions to extract
memory addresses, bounds metadata, and control-flow signatures. Our evaluation across MiBench and SPEC
benchmarks shows that VRT successfully detects all attack variants tested with zero additional instruction overhead. Furthermore, it maintains
memory requirements below 25KB (for 512 entries) and maintains area / power overhead under 8% and 11.65 {\mu}W, respectively. By consolidating three essential security mechanisms into a single hardware structure, VRT provides comprehensive protection while minimizing performance impact.
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Cryptography and Security
CODE ACROSTIC: Robust Watermarking for Code Generation
Li Lin, Siyuan Xin, Yang Cao et al. (+1 more)
Watermarking large
language models (LLMs) is vital for preventing their misuse, including the fabrication of fake news, plagiarism, and spam. It is especially important to watermark LLM-generated code, as it often contains intellectual property.However, we found that existing methods for watermarking LLM-generated code fail to address comment removal attack.In such cases, an attacker can simply remove the comments from the generated code without affecting its functionality, significantly reducing the effectiveness of current code-watermarking techniques.On the other hand, injecting a watermark into code is challenging because, as previous works have noted, most code represents a low-
entropy scenario compared to natural
language. Our approach to addressing this issue involves leveraging prior knowledge to distinguish between low-
entropy and high-
entropy parts of the code, as indicated by a Cue List of words.We then inject the watermark guided by this Cue List, achieving higher detectability and usability than existing methods.We evaluated our proposed method on HumanEvaland compared our method with three state-of-the-art code watermarking techniques. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
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All authors Li Lin, Siyuan Xin, Yang Cao, Xiaochun Cao
Cryptography and Security
One Leak Away: How Pretrained Model Exposure Amplifies Jailbreak Risks in Finetuned LLMs
Yixin Tan, Zhe Yu, Rui Wen et al. (+1 more)
Finetuning pretrained large
language models (LLMs) has become the standard paradigm for developing downstream applications. However, its security implications remain unclear, particularly regarding whether finetuned LLMs inherit jailbreak vulnerabilities from their pretrained sources. We investigate this question in a realistic pretrain-to-finetune threat model, where an attacker has full access to a released pretrained LLM but no access to its proprietary finetuned derivatives. Empirical analysis shows that
adversarial prompts optimized on the pretrained model transfer most effectively to its finetuned variants, revealing inherited vulnerabilities from pretrained to finetuned LLMs. To further examine this inheritance, we conduct representation-level probing, which shows that transferable
prompts are linearly separable within the pretrained hidden states, suggesting that transferability-relevant structure is already encoded in pretrained representations. Building on this insight, we propose the Probe-Guided Projection (PGP) attack, which steers optimization toward transferability-relevant directions. Experiments across multiple LLM families and diverse finetuned tasks confirm PGP's strong transfer success, underscoring the security risks inherent in the pretrain-to-finetune paradigm. Finally, we demonstrate that the same representation-level insights also enable a lightweight defense that mitigates pretrain-to-finetune jailbreak transfer while preserving downstream utility.
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All authors Yixin Tan, Zhe Yu, Rui Wen, Jun Sakuma
Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.CY
Algorithmic Criminal Liability in Greenwashing: Comparing India, United States, and European Union
Sahibpreet Singh and Manjit Singh
AI-powered greenwashing has emerged as an insidious challenge within corporate sustainability governance, exacerbating the opacity of environmental disclosures and subverting regulatory oversight. This study conducts a comparative legal analysis of criminal liability for AI-mediated greenwashing across India, the US, and the EU, exposing doctrinal lacunae in attributing culpability when deceptive claims originate from algorithmic systems. Existing statutes exhibit anthropocentric biases by predicating liability on demonstrable human intent, rendering them ill-equipped to address algorithmic deception. The research identifies a critical gap in jurisprudential adaptation, as prevailing fraud statutes remain antiquated vis-à-vis AI-generated misrepresentation. Utilising a doctrinal legal methodology, this study systematically dissects judicial precedents and statutory instruments, yielding results regarding the potential expansion of corporate criminal liability. Findings underscore the viability of strict liability models, recalibrated governance frameworks for AI accountability, and algorithmic due diligence mandates under ESG regimes. Comparative insights reveal jurisdictional disparities, with the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) offering a potential transnational model. This study contributes to AI ethics and environmental jurisprudence by advocating for a hybrid liability framework integrating algorithmic risk assessment with legal personhood constructs, ensuring algorithmic opacity does not preclude liability enforcement.
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Cryptography and Security
Towards a Systematic Taxonomy of Attacks against Space Infrastructures
Jose Luis Castanon Remy and Shouhuai Xu
Space infrastructures represent an emerging domain that is critical to the global economy and society. However, this domain is vulnerable to attacks, including cyber attacks and other kinds of attacks. To enhance the resilience of this domain, we must understand these attacks that can be waged against it and the defenses that can be employed to mitigate these attacks. The status quo is that there is neither a systematic understanding of these attacks against, nor defenses for, space infrastructures, despite their clear importance in guiding systematic analysis of space security and future research. In this paper, we fill the void by proposing the first systematic taxonomy of attacks against, and defenses for, space infrastructures. We hope this paper will inspire a community effort at refining the taxonomy towards a widely used one.
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Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.LG
GradID: Adversarial Detection via Intrinsic Dimensionality of Gradients
Mohammad Mahdi Razmjoo, Mohammad Mahdi Sharifian and Saeed Bagheri Shouraki
Despite their remarkable performance, deep neural networks exhibit a critical vulnerability: small, often imperceptible,
adversarial perturbations can lead to drastically altered model predictions. Given the stringent reliability demands of applications such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving, robust detection of such
adversarial attacks is paramount. In this paper, we investigate the
geometric properties of a model's input loss landscape. We analyze the Intrinsic Dimensionality (ID) of the model's gradient parameters, which quantifies the minimal number of coordinates required to describe the data points on their underlying
manifold. We reveal a distinct and consistent difference in the ID for natural and
adversarial data, which forms the basis of our proposed detection method. We validate our approach across two distinct operational scenarios. First, in a batch-wise context for identifying malicious data groups, our method demonstrates high efficacy on
datasets like MNIST and SVHN. Second, in the critical individual-sample setting, we establish new state-of-the-art results on challenging
benchmarks such as CIFAR-10 and MS COCO. Our detector significantly surpasses existing methods against a wide array of attacks, including CW and AutoAttack, achieving detection rates consistently above 92% on CIFAR-10. The results underscore the robustness of our
geometric approach, highlighting that intrinsic dimensionality is a powerful fingerprint for
adversarial detection across diverse
datasets and attack strategies.
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Cryptography and Security
RunPBA – Runtime attestation for microcontrollers with PACBTI
André Cirne, Patrícia R. Sousa, João S. Resende et al. (+1 more)
The widespread adoption of embedded systems has led to their deployment in critical real-world applications, making them attractive targets for malicious actors. These devices face unique challenges in mitigating vulnerabilities due to intrinsic constraints, such as low energy consumption requirements and limited computational resources. This paper presents RunPBA, a hardware-based runtime attestation system designed to defend against control flow attacks while maintaining minimal performance overhead and adhering to strict power consumption constraints. RunPBA leverages PACBTI, a new processor extension tailored for the Arm Cortex M processor family, allowing robust protection without requiring hardware modifications, a limitation present in similar solutions. We implemented a proof-of-concept and evaluated it using two
benchmark suites. Experimental results indicate that RunPBA imposes a
geometric mean performance overhead of only 1% and 4.7% across the
benchmarks, underscoring its efficiency and suitability for real-world deployment.
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All authors André Cirne, Patrícia R. Sousa, João S. Resende, Luís Antunes
Cryptography and Security
ceLLMate: Sandboxing Browser AI Agents
Luoxi Meng, Henry Feng, Ilia Shumailov et al. (+1 more)
Browser-using
agents (BUAs) are an emerging class of AI
agents that interact with web browsers in human-like ways, including clicking, scrolling, filling forms, and navigating across pages. While these
agents help automate repetitive online tasks, they are vulnerable to
prompt injection attacks that trick an
agent into performing undesired actions, such as leaking private information or issuing unintended state-changing requests. We propose ceLLMate, a browser-level sandboxing framework that restricts the
agent's ambient authority and reduces the blast radius of
prompt injections. We address the semantic gap challenge that is fundamental to BUAs – writing and enforcing security policies for low-level UI tools like clicks and keystrokes is brittle and error-prone. Our core insight is to perform sandboxing at the HTTP layer because all side-effecting UI operations will result in network communication to the website's backend. We implement ceLLMate as an
agent-agnostic browser extension and demonstrate how it enables sandboxing policies that block
prompt injection attacks in the WASP
benchmark with 7.25–15% latency overhead.
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All authors Luoxi Meng, Henry Feng, Ilia Shumailov, Earlence Fernandes
Cryptography and Security · Cross-listed from cs.SE
SHERLOCK: A Deep Learning Approach To Detect Software Vulnerabilities
Saadh Jawwadh and Guhanathan Poravi
The increasing reliance on software in various applications has made the problem of software vulnerability detection more critical. Software vulnerabilities can lead to security breaches, data theft, and other negative outcomes. Traditional software vulnerability detection techniques, such as static and dynamic analysis, have been shown to be ineffective at detecting multiple vulnerabilities. To address this issue, this study employed a deep learning approach, specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), to solve the software vulnerability detection problem. A 5-split cross-validation approach was used to train and evaluate the CNN model, which takes tokenized source code as input. The findings indicated that Sherlock successfully detected multiple vulnerabilities at the function level, and its performance was particularly strong for CWE-199, CWE-120, and CWE-Other, with an overall high accuracy rate and significant true positive and true negative values. However, the performance was less reliable for some vulnerabilities due to the lack of a standardized
dataset which will be a future research direction. The results suggest that compared to current techniques, the proposed deep learning approach has the potential to substantially enhance the accuracy of software vulnerability detection.
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Cryptography and Security
Detecting Prompt Injection Attacks Against Application Using Classifiers
Safwan Shaheer, G. M. Refatul Islam, Mohammad Rafid Hamid et al. (+3 more)
Prompt injection attacks can compromise the security and stability of critical systems, from infrastructure to large web applications. This work curates and augments a
prompt injection
dataset based on the HackAPrompt Playground Submissions corpus and trains several classifiers, including LSTM, feed forward neural networks, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes, to detect malicious
prompts in LLM integrated web applications. The proposed approach improves
prompt injection detection and mitigation, helping protect targeted applications and systems.
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All authors Safwan Shaheer, G. M. Refatul Islam, Mohammad Rafid Hamid, Md. Abrar Faiaz Khan, Md. Omar Faruk, Yaseen Nur
Cryptography and Security
Cryptographic transformations over polyadic rings
Steven Duplij, Qiang Guo and Na Fu
This article introduces a novel cryptographic paradigm based on nonderived polyadic algebraic structures. Traditional cryptosystems rely on binary operations within groups, rings, or fields, whose well-understood properties can be exploited in cryptanalysis. To overcome these vulnerabilities, we propose a shift to polyadic rings, which generalize classical rings by allowing operations of higher arity: an $m$-ary addition and an $n$-ary multiplication. The foundation of our approach is the construction of polyadic integers – congruence classes of ordinary integers endowed with such $m$-ary and $n$-ary operations. A key innovation is the parameter-to-arity mapping $\Phi(a,b)=(m,n)$, which links the parameters $(a,b)$ defining a congruence class to the specific arities required for algebraic closure. This mapping is mathematically intricate: it is non-injective, non-surjective, and multivalued. This complex, non-unique relationship forms the core of the proposed cryptosystem's security. We present two concrete encryption procedures that leverage this structure by encoding plaintext within the parameters of polyadic rings and transmitting information via polyadically quantized analog signals. In one method, plaintext is linked to the additive arity $m_{i}$ and secured using the summation of such signals; in the other, it is linked to a ring parameter $a_{i}$ and secured using their multiplication. In both cases, the "quantized" nature of polyadic operations generates systems of equations that are straightforward for a legitimate recipient with the correct key but exceptionally difficult for an attacker without it. The resulting framework promises a substantial increase in cryptographic security. This work establishes the theoretical foundation for this new class of encryption schemes and highlights their potential for constructing robust, next-generation cryptographic protocols.
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Cryptography and Security
Intelligent Adaptive Federated Byzantine Agreement for Robust Blockchain Consensus
Erdhi Widyarto Nugroho, R.Rizal Isnanto and Luhur Bayuaji
The
Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) achieves rapid consensus by relying on overlapping quorum slices. But this architecture leads to a high dependence on the availability of validators when about one fourth of validators go down, the classical FBA can lose liveness or fail to reach agreement. We thus come up with an Adaptive FBA architecture that can reconfigure quorum slices intelligently based on real time validator reputation to overcome this drawback. Our model includes trust scores computed from EigenTrust and a sliding window behavioral assessment to determine the reliability of validators. We have built the intelligent adaptive FBA model and conducted tests in a
Stellar based setting. Results of real life experiments reveal that the system is stable enough to keep consensus when more than half of the validators (up to 62 percent) are disconnected, which is a great extension of the failure threshold of a classical FBA. A fallback mode allows the network to be functional with as few as three validators, thus showing a significant robustness enhancement. Besides, a comparative study with the existing consensus protocols shows that Adaptive FBA can be an excellent choice for the next generation of blockchain systems, especially for constructing a resilient blockchain infrastructure.
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Cryptography and Security
Unveiling Malicious Logic: Towards a Statement-Level Taxonomy and Dataset for Securing Python Packages
Ahmed Ryan, Junaid Mansur Ifti, Md Erfan et al. (+2 more)
The widespread adoption of open-source ecosystems enables developers to integrate third-party packages, but also exposes them to malicious packages crafted to execute harmful behavior via public repositories such as PyPI. Existing
datasets (e.g., pypi-malregistry, DataDog, OpenSSF, MalwareBench) label packages as malicious or benign at the package level, but do not specify which statements implement malicious behavior. This coarse granularity limits research and practice: models cannot be trained to localize malicious code, detectors cannot justify alerts with code-level evidence, and analysts cannot systematically study recurring malicious indicators or attack chains. To address this gap, we construct a statement-level
dataset of 370 malicious Python packages (833 files, 90,527 lines) with 2,962 labeled occurrences of malicious indicators. From these annotations, we derive a fine-grained taxonomy of 47 malicious indicators across 7 types that capture how
adversarial behavior is implemented in code, and we apply sequential pattern mining to uncover recurring indicator sequences that characterize common attack workflows. Our contribution enables explainable, behavior-centric detection and supports both semantic-aware model training and practical heuristics for strengthening software supply-chain defenses.
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All authors Ahmed Ryan, Junaid Mansur Ifti, Md Erfan, Akond Ashfaque Ur Rahman, Md Rayhanur Rahman