arXiv AI

Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

arXiv:2606. 20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Probing the Prefill: Detecting Code Vulnerabilities via Latent Activations

The paper investigates whether the hidden activations of large language models (LLMs) contain signals about the vulnerability of C/C++ code when the code is provided as context. By extracting prefill token activations from four LLMs and training small MLP probes, the authors achieve an average F1 score of 41.7% across four benchmarks, with the best probe matching state‑of‑the‑art fine‑tuned classifiers on the Devign dataset. The results suggest that a coding LLM’s internal representation can inform vulnerability detection, opening the door to lightweight, model‑native screening methods.

By Alizishaan Khatri
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

What Do They Fix? LLM-Aided Categorization of Security Patches for Critical Memory Bugs

The paper introduces DUALLM, a dual-method pipeline that uses a Large Language Model and a fine‑tuned small language model to classify Linux kernel security patches with high precision. By analyzing commit titles, messages, diffs, and code context, DUALLM achieves 87.4% accuracy and an F1‑score of 0.875, outperforming existing methods. It successfully identified 111 recent patches addressing out‑of‑bounds or use‑after‑free vulnerabilities, with 90 confirmed true positives and proof‑of‑concept exploits demonstrating the validity of the classifications.

By Xingyu Li (UC Riverside), Juefei Pu (UC Riverside), Yifan Wu (UC Riverside), Xiaochen Zou (UC Riverside), Shitong Zhu (UC Riverside), Qiushi Wu (UC Riverside), Zheng Zhang (UC Riverside), Joshua Hsu (UC Riverside), Yue Dong (UC Riverside), Zhiyun Qian (UC Riverside), Kangjie Lu (UC Riverside), Trent Jaeger (UC Riverside), Michael De Lucia (UC Riverside), Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy (UC Riverside)
arXiv AI
Jun 4

TamperBench: Systematically Stress-Testing LLM Safety Under Fine-Tuning and Tampering

arXiv:2602. 06911v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As increasingly capable open-weight large language models (LLMs) are deployed, improving their tamper resistance against unsafe modifications, whether accidental or intentional, becomes critical to minimize risks.

By Saad Hossain, Tom Tseng, Punya Syon Pandey, Samanvay Vajpayee, Matthew Kowal, Nayeema Nonta, Samuel Simko, Stephen Casper, Zhijing Jin, Kellin Pelrine, Sirisha Rambhatla
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

arXiv:2605. 23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source).

By Vivek Dahiya, Sunny Nehra, Vipul Dholariya, Bhavik Shangari, Chandra Khatri