arXiv AI

Multi-View Fusion for Encrypted C2 Detection: A Leakage-Controlled Measurement Study of Evaluation Pitfalls

The paper evaluates the common assumption that combining flow statistics and TLS handshake fingerprints improves encrypted command-and-control detection. Using 17,577 TLS flows from 62 real Cobalt Strike captures, the authors show that data leakage and preprocessing choices inflate performance metrics, revealing that the true benefit of multi-view fusion is minimal (0.022 F1). They also uncover that many captures contain only benign traffic and that class imbalance is an artifact of analysis rather than a real feature of the task.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

SoK: Where Do Flow Labels Come From? Auditing Label Provenance in Encrypted Traffic Benchmarks

The paper audits 14 encrypted traffic classification benchmarks to investigate how flow labels are generated. It finds two common labeling strategies—coarse inheritance, which may mislabel flows, and overstrict filtering, which may discard useful flows—leading to inconsistencies between benchmark labels and actual traffic records. The study also quantifies the impact of these labeling practices on classifier accuracy, showing that inherited labels limit balanced accuracy to 0.56–0.76, while filtering can raise macro accuracy from 0.44 to 0.65.

By Sizhe Huang, Shujie Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

The paper reports a privacy breach in a two-node split‑LLM training system where the returned gradient reveals which data rows were real, despite the system passing standard privacy checks. By exploiting the fact that decoy rows produce zero gradients, an attacker can identify real rows with 100% accuracy across multiple runs. The authors demonstrate that adding gradient clipping and noise can mitigate the leak, but the system remains vulnerable to several untested attack vectors.

By Georgios Politis, Evangelos Pappas
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Unknown-Traffic Detection, Calibration and Shortcut Reliance in Distilled Encrypted-Traffic Classifiers over One Year

The study investigates what knowledge a student model inherits from its teachers beyond accuracy when using knowledge distillation for encrypted‑traffic classification. By distilling a 101k‑parameter student from two teachers of equal accuracy but different construction, the authors test ten hypotheses over a year of real TLS traffic, finding that unknown‑traffic detection and shortcut reliance can transfer depending on temperature settings and model size, while other abilities do not. The results show that distillation can propagate teacher habits, but some inherited capabilities can also be achieved without a teacher.

By Mahmoud Abbasi
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Attack Ensembles Expose a Safety-Utility Trade-off in Black-Box Guard Defenses Against Encoded VLM Jailbreaks

arXiv:2607. 26574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet a guard judges an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encoded as set theory, formal logic, a classical language, code, or text rendered inside an image slips past a guard that would block it in plain language - the decode gap.

By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Yi Feng, Xiao Luo, Zijian Xiao, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A False Average: Pooled CoT-Monitor Accuracy Conceals a Reasoning-Dependent Fragility

The paper demonstrates that aggregate accuracy figures for chain‑of‑thought (CoT) monitors can be misleading because a large portion of detected hacks rely solely on action patterns rather than reasoning. By rewriting only the agent’s reasoning to appear truthful while keeping actions identical, the authors show that the monitor’s performance on the reasoning‑dependent subset collapses dramatically, yet the overall pooled accuracy drops only modestly. The study reveals that CoT monitors are fragile when reasoning is the key signal and that accuracy should be reported separately for this subset.

By Shikhar Shiromani, Leo Richter
arXiv AI
3d ago

Blind, Not Weak: A Best-of-Suite Safety-Utility Frontier for Recover-and-Reguard Defenses Against Encoded VLM Jailbreaks

The paper presents a preprocessor that recovers and decodes encoded content in vision‑language models to close the decode gap that allows harmful requests to bypass safety classifiers. Evaluated against eleven encoding attacks, the preprocessor raises block rates from 0 % to 67‑90 % but also increases benign over‑refusal, and no configuration achieves an ensemble attack‑success rate below 40 % while keeping benign over‑refusal under 70 %. The study shows that closing one encoding channel merely relocates success rather than eliminating it, highlighting the limits of recovery‑based defenses.

By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Hanwen Liu, Yi Feng, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Yang Chen, Zijian Xiao, Xiao Luo, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita