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arXiv AI By Chieh-Yuan Chang, Guan-Wei Chen, Chia-Yi Hsu, Chih Yang, Chia-Mu Yu, Chun-Ying Huang

NameTrap: Steering AI Coding Agents Toward Security Vulnerabilities via Variable Names

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The paper introduces NameTrap, a source‑code poisoning attack that renames identifiers in third‑party Python files to steer AI coding agents toward specific Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) vulnerabilities. By iteratively aligning variable names with CWE‑specific conventions, the attack achieves success rates ranging from 22.5% to 75.0% across six agents and four vulnerability categories, outperforming random and neutral renaming strategies. The poisoned files contain no explicit instructions or vulnerable statements, and existing AI‑based and static security analyzers fail to detect the induced weaknesses.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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