arXiv AI

TERMon: Detecting Persistent Behavioral Threats in Edge AI via Hardware-Native Ternary Runtime Monitor

TERMon is a lightweight hardware runtime monitor designed for edge AI accelerators in safety‑critical environments. It detects persistent behavioral threats—such as model corruption, distribution shift, and adversarial inputs—by observing inference behavior through hardware‑efficient ternary patterns matched against a thermometer‑encoded fingerprint. Implemented on a PYNQ‑Z2 FPGA, TERMon operates with a two‑cycle decision latency and requires no on‑chip block RAM or DSPs.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

TEE-X: TEE-aware Acceleration Framework for Large Vision Models at the Edge

TEE-X is a TEE‑aware acceleration framework designed to run large vision models, such as Vision Transformers, entirely within Trusted Execution Environments. It introduces a sensitivity‑aware modularization technique and vectorization to overcome memory constraints and latency challenges on edge devices. The framework is validated on OP‑TEE for Arm TrustZone and optimized for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, achieving GPU‑level inference latency with minimal accuracy‑latency trade‑offs.

By Kurt M Wilson, Mohaiminul Al Nahian, Abeer Matar A. Almalky, Sadat Shahriyar, Souvik Kundu, Zhishan Guo, Abdullah Al Arafat, Adnan Siraj Rakin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

Faults That Fortify: CNN Adversarial Robustness via GPU Undervolting

The paper demonstrates that undervolting GPUs during CNN training introduces stochastic faults that act as implicit regularization, improving adversarial robustness while reducing power consumption. Experiments on LeNet, VGG-6, and MobileNetV3 trained on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that undervolted models consistently outperform nominal-voltage models in both standard and adversarial training regimes. The approach offers a hardware-level defense that requires no algorithmic changes and yields significant energy savings due to the quadratic relationship between dynamic power and supply voltage.

By Behnam Omidi, Ahmad Tahmasivand, Husam Alsyouri, Saba Al-Sayouri, Chongzhou Fang, Ihsen Alouani, Khaled N. Khasawneh
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Not to Break, but to Attest: Adversarial Probes for Privacy-Preserving LLM Verification

The paper introduces a privacy‑preserving zk‑SNARK audit framework that uses adversarial‑style probes to detect logit drift between an approved large language model and a modified deployment. It offers three probe families—token‑based (black‑box), embedding‑based (gray‑box), and stress probes (partial white‑box)—allowing users to balance sensitivity, access, and cost. Experiments across LLM architectures and GPU platforms show token‑based probes achieve the highest mean sensitivity while remaining practical in a black‑box setting, with Groth16 proving times scaling modestly from 1.02 to 1.78 seconds and constant proof size.

By Cameron Wilding, Mina Shaker, Fatemeh Ganji
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

OVIG: Optimistic Verification of AI Training Integrity via Gradient Signals

OVIG is an optimistic verification framework that audits AI training by replaying the process and comparing gradient differences against an empirically calibrated boundary. It treats any gradient difference exceeding this boundary as a malicious deviation. By partitioning training into stride‑s intervals and storing evidence only at interval endpoints, OVIG dramatically reduces off‑chain storage and transmission costs while maintaining zero attack success rate across language, vision, and diffusion workloads.

By Hongxu Su, Jianzhu Yao, Huan Zhang, Xuechao Wang, Pramod Viswanath
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Bit-Exact AI Inference Verification Without Performance Tradeoffs

arXiv:2606. 00279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verifying claims about AI workloads is a pre- requisite for credible AI governance of covert adversaries (who comply with monitoring only when detection likelihood is high), yet the ap- parent non-determinism of GPU floating-point arithmetic forces auditors to accept approximate output matches.

By Naci Cankaya
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Architecting the Secure AI-SOC: A Neurosymbolic Framework for Pipeline Integrity and Threat Mitigation

The paper proposes a neurosymbolic defense architecture for AI-enhanced Security Operations Centers (AI‑SOCs) that protects against indirect prompt injection via log poisoning. It combines deterministic SIEM decoders as a pre‑filter with NeMo Guardrails for semantic validation, and adds a closed‑loop telemetry system for Human‑in‑the‑Loop visibility. Experimental results mapped to the MITRE ATLAS taxonomy show the approach effectively dismantles promptware kill chains and delivers a resilient, observable defense for next‑generation AI‑SOCs.

By Anna Gazani, Spyridon Kounoupidis, Panagiotis Katsaros, Nikolaos Kekatos, Grigorios Tsoumakas, Georgios Koutidis
arXiv AI
3d ago

Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMs

The paper investigates how inference optimization for large language models can introduce numerical inconsistencies that trigger hidden backdoors. It introduces two types of optimization‑triggered backdoors: the Input‑Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) and the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB), the latter enabling a model to remain benign under normal execution but activate a backdoor when optimization is applied. Experiments on seven open‑source LLMs, across multiple tasks and optimization backends, show UOB can achieve up to 100% attack success while maintaining clean accuracy, and the authors propose three defenses that reduce the attack success rate to 0.02.

By Yifei Wang, Yida Yang, Tianlin Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Li Pan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

RouteScan: A Non-Intrusive Approach to Auditing MoE LLMs Safety via Expert Routing Telemetry

RouteScan is a non‑intrusive auditing framework that detects harmful behavior in Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models by analyzing expert‑routing telemetry captured from GPU execution. It uses the number of active GPU threads during the prefilling phase as a micro‑architectural fingerprint to isolate cross‑domain risk indicators and precisely identify malicious prompts. Evaluations on four open‑source MoE LLMs show strong generalization with AUROC > 0.91 on unseen harmful domains, while privacy tests indicate that full prompts cannot be reliably recovered from aggregated telemetry.

By Bo Lv, Zhiheng Xu, KeDong Xiu, Ruyi Ding, Tianhang Zheng, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren