arXiv Machine Learning

Agentic Vulnerability Reasoning on COTS Binaries

arXiv:2605. 05000v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM agents have been increasingly adopted for solving security tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

VEX-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Assessing Exploitability of Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

arXiv:2609.08040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The software supply chain has become an increasingly exposed attack surface because of its reliance on intricate yet fragile dependencies. Existing d...

By Jiahao Shi, Edward Tsien, Yifeng Di, Hongjiao Zhang, Yuan Tang, Ronit Dey, Ilona Shishov, Gal Netanel, Zvi Grinberg, Vladimir Belousov, Bat-Zion Rotman, Ilan Pinto, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 7

When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

The paper examines how large‑language‑model (LLM) decompilers, which produce clean, idiomatic C code, are currently evaluated mainly on recompilability and passing shipped tests. It shows that these metrics can mask significant behavioral differences: a decompiled function may recompile and pass all tests yet diverge on other inputs or lose disclosed vulnerabilities. To address this, the authors propose Decompile‑Diverge, a behavioral oracle that synthesizes drivers, fuzzes inputs, and compares the decompiled code’s behavior to the original, revealing divergences in up to 13% of cases and exposing gaps in current evaluation suites.

By Chang Liu, Edward Raff, Kristopher Micinski
arXiv AI
Jun 9

SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios

arXiv:2509. 22097v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model-powered code agents are rapidly transforming software engineering, yet the security risks of their generated code have become a critical concern.

By Junkai Chen, Huihui Huang, Yunbo Lyu, Junwen An, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Haoye Tian, Yikun Li, Zhenhao Li, Xin Zhou, Xing Hu, David Lo
arXiv AI
4d ago

Cheap to Hypothesize, Costly to Verify: The Defense Surface of Agentic Vulnerability Discovery

The paper introduces RedHerring, a defense mechanism that inserts safe decoy vulnerabilities into code repositories to divert autonomous LLM agents’ verification efforts away from real security flaws. By embedding CVE-derived vulnerability chains with false bridges and providing a private certificate for quick verification, RedHerring forces agents to spend a significant portion of their limited resources on decoys. Experiments on 33 OSS‑Fuzz projects show a 38.7‑60.4% reduction in discovered real vulnerabilities, even when agents are aware of decoys.

By Kaikai Zhang, Zihan Zhang, Yuchong Xie, Zesen Liu, Shuangjie Yao, Zhixiang Zhang, Dongdong She
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Beyond Static Guarantees: Measuring the Static-Pass Dynamic-Fail Gap in Security-Sensitive and LLM-Generated Python Code

The paper introduces the Static‑Pass Dynamic‑Fail (SPDF) phenomenon, showing that static analysis can miss vulnerabilities that are exploitable at runtime. Using a three‑stage pipeline—static scanning, LLM‑driven CWE reasoning, and autonomous exploit verification—it evaluated 1,355 Python samples and found that 14.53% of samples that passed static checks were actually exploitable. The study highlights that static‑analysis success and runtime security are distinct assurance layers, especially for AI‑generated and security‑sensitive code.

By Jessica Pourleyli, Maitreyee Das Urmi, Glaucia Melo
arXiv AI
Sep 4

PatchBench: Evaluating AI Agents for Vulnerability Patching

PatchBench introduces a benchmark to evaluate AI agents on realistic vulnerability patching tasks, addressing two key threats to validity: patch memorization and surface-level fixes that merely suppress crashes. The study finds that 25% of agent patches resemble historical developer patches, and that PoC-only validation inflates success rates by 1.83× on average. PatchBench mitigates these issues by selecting vulnerabilities whose true fixes lie outside the crash stack, migrating historical vulnerabilities into new contexts, and employing rigorous validation for security and semantic correctness.

By Chihao Shen, Jiacheng Li, Aastha Mahajan, Jeffery Siyuan Tian, Yonghwi Kwon, Yizheng Chen