arXiv AI

Needles at Scale: LLM-Assisted Target Selection for Windows Vulnerability Research

arXiv:2606. 01364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The attack surface of a modern operating system is a haystack: thousands of signed binaries and millions of functions, almost none relevant to any given vulnerability.

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 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 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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

FuzzingBrain-Bench V1: Evaluating Open-Ended Bug Discovery by LLMs

FuzzingBrain‑Bench V1 is a new benchmark that tests large language models (LLMs) on their ability to discover software bugs in open‑source projects. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on a single target vulnerability, this benchmark gives models a Docker‑based harness and asks them to generate inputs that trigger as many distinct crashes as possible. The first version contains 77 challenges from 43 projects (36 C, 32 C++, 9 Java/JVM) and evaluates Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Claude Opus 4.8, with Claude Opus 4.8 achieving the highest score by triggering crashes in 60 of 77 challenges.

By Ze Sheng, Aleksandar Kezic, Zhicheng Chen, Jeff Huang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Which Defense Closes Which Threat? Attributing OWASP-LLM-Top-10 Coverage and Its Brittleness Under Paraphrasing

arXiv:2606. 02822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLM applications stack several defense families -- refusal-phrase filters, token-budget controls, model allowlists, rate limits, tool-registry authentication -- yet existing breach-and-attack-simulation (BAS) benchmarks report a single aggregate coverage number, hiding which family closes which threat.

By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano