arXiv AI

SpecCloak: Probing Harmful Code Generation through Engineering Specifications

SpecCloak investigates how presenting coding tasks as engineering specifications—via the PseudoSpec template—affects large language models’ refusal to generate harmful code. Experiments on five open-weight models show that specification prompting significantly lowers refusal rates even when risk keywords remain, shifting internal representations toward code-output contexts. Building on this, SpecCloak combines PseudoSpec with discriminator-guided optimization to achieve a 28.91% attack success rate, while SpecReveal offers a defense that detects such attacks with 96.88% accuracy without fine‑tuning the target model.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Toward Secure Code Generation: Bridging Correctness and Security via Task-Adaptive Vulnerability Modeling and Execution-Based Benchmarking

arXiv:2407.02395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program synthesis, yet they often generate code that is functionally plausible but ins...

By Jiexin Wang, Liuwen Cao, Xitong Luo, Yang Cao, Zhenghao Li, Yunyi Xiao, Mengchen Zhao, Adam Jatowt, Yi Cai
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Detecting Data Poisoning in Code Generation LLMs via Black-Box, Vulnerability-Oriented Scanning

The paper introduces CodeScan, a black-box, vulnerability-oriented scanning framework designed to detect data poisoning and backdoor attacks in code generation large language models (LLMs). CodeScan operates by analyzing structural similarities across multiple code generations, normalizing them with abstract syntax tree (AST) techniques, and then applying LLM-based vulnerability analysis to identify recurring insecure patterns. Evaluations on 117 models across three architectures and multiple sizes show over 97% detection accuracy with fewer false positives compared to prior methods.

By Shenao Yan, Shan Jin, Shimaa Ahmed, Sunpreet Singh Arora, Yiwei Cai, Yizhen Wang, Yuan Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 8

Beyond Refusal: A Same-Lineage Study of Aligned and Abliterated LLMs for Vulnerability Analysis

arXiv:2607. 05842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-assisted software security operates at a difficult boundary: the vulnerability-analysis terminology needed for legitimate code review, triage, and repair can closely resemble terminology associated with misuse.

By Mingchen Li, Meikang Qiu, Zifan Peng, Heng Fan, Song Fu, Junhua Ding, Yunhe Feng
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Large Language Models at the Intersection of Software Engineering and Software Security:An Evidence-Centered Structured Survey and Research Agenda

Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving from simple code completion tools to repository‑scale agents capable of retrieving context, editing files, executing tools, and engaging in security‑sensitive workflows. A structured survey up to May 31 2026 reviews LLM work across software engineering and security tasks, adaptation mechanisms, artifact granularity, and evaluation design, and introduces an assurance framework that separates functional correctness, security, operational reliability, evidence provenance, and agent authority. The review highlights that while execution feedback and repository access improve engineering task completion, they do not guarantee security, and static‑analysis labels rarely ensure deployable correctness; it also identifies common validity threats and proposes a minimum reporting protocol and a research agenda focused on jointly secure‑and‑functional benchmarks, repository‑scale threat models, calibrated human oversight, longitudinal maintainability evidence, and reproducible agent evaluation.

By Wei Lin, Tao Zhou, Zhaofei Xie, Changgui Hong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Safety Targeted Embedding Exploit via Refinement

Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

DualGauge: Automated Joint Security-Functionality Benchmarking of Specification-Only Code Generation by LLMs and Coding Agents

arXiv:2511. 20709v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based coding agents are now used to generate code from natural-language specifications, yet ensuring such code is both functionally correct and secure remains a challenge.

By Rupam Patir, Keyan Guo, Suvadra Barua, Abhijeet Pathak, Dinesh Gudimetla, Jiawei Guo, Hongxin Hu, Haipeng Cai