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:2603. 26270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smart contracts govern billions of dollars in decentralized finance (DeFi), yet automated vulnerability detection remains challenging because many vulnerabilities are tightly coupled with project-specific business logic.
By Ziqiao Kong, Wanxu Xia, Chong Wang, Yue Xue, Yi Lu, Pan Li, Shaohua Li, Zong Cao, Yang Liu
arXiv:2606. 08960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent benchmarks score submissions with outcome verifiers that are typically hand-written and brittle, leaving them open to reward hacking.
By Ziqian Zhong, Ivgeni Segal, Ivan Bercovich, Shashwat Saxena, Kexun Zhang, Aditi Raghunathan
The paper introduces PACE (Policy‑Attested Contract Execution), a framework that sits between large‑language‑model (LLM) based autonomous AI agents and on‑chain DeFi operations. PACE defines typed transaction intents, a deterministic policy verifier, and signed Policy Decision Records (PDRs) that cryptographically bind an approved intent, policy, and simulation report to the exact on‑chain execution bytes, providing replay and expiration protection. In evaluations across 40 tasks and six baselines, PACE achieves zero unsafe executions and zero false positives, outperforming unguarded agents by a large margin.
By Rabimba Karanjai (Larry), Yang Lu (Larry), Richard Williamson (Larry), Hemanth Hm (Larry), Prakhar Mehrotra (Larry), Lei Xu (Larry), Weidong (Larry), Shi
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
arXiv:2606. 14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation.
By Fengyu Liu, Jiarun Dai, Yihe Fan, Wuyuao Mai, Ziao Li, Bofei Chen, Jie Zhang, Zheng Lou, Bocheng Xiang, Qiyi Zhang, Xudong Pan, Geng Hong, Yuan Zhang, Min Yang
AgentXploit is a two‑role auditing system that separates repository‑level attack‑path discovery from runtime exploitation for AI agents. The Analyzer Agent traces attacker‑controlled inputs to sensitive operations and records candidate attack paths, while the Exploiter Agent turns these paths into concrete attacks and refines them using runtime feedback. The system is evaluated on AgentXploit‑Bench, a benchmark of 72 reproducible vulnerabilities across 12 open‑source AI‑agent systems, achieving 59.3% end‑to‑end success compared to 38.4% for Codex, and 79.2% attack success on AgentDojo versus 52.7% for AgentVigil.
By Weida Liang, Shi Qiu, Zhun Wang, Simon Sure, Xiaoyuan Liu, Tianneng Shi, Zhaorun Chen, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song
arXiv:2607. 26791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly adopted in real-world security operations with access to host artifacts and command-line interfaces (CLIs), making it critical to thoroughly assess their security capabilities.
By Lehan Wang, Boli Chen, Ruixue Ding, Pengjun Xie, Jinwei Huang, Zhendong Liu, Shuo Wang, Tao Lei, Xin Ouyang, Xiaomeng Li
arXiv:2608. 06471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software.
By Amine Lbath, Manan Suri, Aurelien Delaitre, Vadim Okun, Massih-Reza Amini, Ram D. Sriram, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2508.14925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: By providing a standardized interface for LLM agents to interact with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a...
By Zhiqiang Wang, Yichao Gao, Yanting Wang, Suyuan Liu, Haifeng Sun, Haoran Cheng, Guanquan Shi, Haohua Du, Xiangyang Li
The paper surveys the growing use of AI agents that modify external state via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, noting an increase from 27% to 65% of tool use. It argues that when such agents operate on public blockchains, the blockchain execution layer’s properties—irreversibility, signing authority, continuous autonomy, and sequence-level composition—reshape the threat model, making failures irreversible. The authors organize existing MCP-security literature into an attack-surface taxonomy, present a Web3 risk-mapping matrix linking attack classes to amplified impacts and mitigations, and conclude that current defenses are inadequate, stopping fewer than 30% of attacks and less than 3% of model-level safety failures.
whyItMatters":"The study highlights that AI agents acting on Web3 introduce irreversible risks that conventional software security cannot address, underscoring the need for stronger, blockchain-aware safeguards."
By Rabimba Karanjai (Larry), Yang Lu (Larry), Nour Diallo (Larry), Wujie Xiong (Larry), Lei Xu (Larry), Weidong (Larry), Shi
arXiv:2606. 30755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Claw-like AI agents (e.
By Peizhi Niu, Wenjie Qu, Shangding Gu, Tianneng Shi, Yuankai Li, Ahmad Tawaha, Hend Alzahrani, Vincent Siu, Boyi Li, Chenguang Wang, Jiaheng Zhang, Basel Alomair, Ming Jin, Muhao Chen, Chi Wang, Costas Spanos, Dawn Song