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cybersecurity

48 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

TrojanGYM: A Detector-in-the-Loop LLM for Adaptive RTL Hardware Trojan Insertion

Hardware Trojans (HTs) remain a critical threat because learning-based detectors often overfit to narrow trigger/payload patterns and small, stylized benchmarks. We introduce TrojanGYM, an agentic, LLM-driven framework that automatically curates HT insertions to expose detector blind spots. Given high-level HT specifications, a suite of cooperating LLM agents (instantiated with GPT-4, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Gemini-2.5Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5) proposes and refines RTL modifications that realize diverse triggers and payloads without impacting functionality of both the HT and the design under attack. TrojanGYM implements an agentic loop co-designed with HT detectors, in which constraint-aware syntactic checking, testbench-based functional verification, and GNN-based HT detectors provide feedback that iteratively refines HT specifications and insertion strategies to better surface detector blind spots. We further propose Robust-GNN4TJ, a new implementation of GNN4TJ with improved graph extraction, training robustness, and prediction reliability, especially on LLM-generated HT designs. On the most challenging TrojanGYM-generated benchmarks, Robust-GNN4TJ raises HT detection rates from 0% to 60% relative to prior art. We instantiate TrojanGYM on SRAM, AES-128, UART, and RISC-V designs at RTL, and show that it systematically produces diverse, functionally correct HTs that reach up to 68.75% evasion rates against modern GNN-based detectors, revealing robustness gaps that are not apparent when these detectors are evaluated on existing TrustHub-style benchmarks. We release all codes and artifacts at https://github.com/DfX-NYUAD/TrojanGYM.

Saideep Sreekumar, Zeng Wang, Akashdeep Saha et al. · 0 citations

Jailbreaking in the Haystack

NINJA (short for Needle-in-haystack jailbreak attack), a method that jailbreaks aligned LMs by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals to reveal fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.

R. Shah, C. Wu, Shashwat Saxena et al. · 4 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Feb 2025

`From Prompt to Perturbation': An Adaptive Framework for Voice-Based Jailbreaks on Audio LLMs

An adaptive jailbreak attack framework for systematic evaluation of both cascaded pipelines and end-to-end large audio-language models under a unified experimental setting that achieves consistently higher attack success rates across diverse audio-based LLM systems.

Linghan Huang, Bo Li, Huaming Chen et al. · 12 citations · ⚡2
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

From Threat Intelligence to Detection: Knowledge-driven Enrichment and Template-based Rule Grounding for Automated Sigma Rule Generation

AUTOSIGMA, an automated solution for transforming unstructured CTI reports into relevant Sigma rules that enables accurate, context-aware, and relevant rule generation, outperforms alternative solutions and LLM models in rule validity, rule relevancy, MITRE ATT&CK technique coverage, and robustness to input quality.

Sepehr Ghaffarzadegan, Boubakr Nour, M. Pourzandi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Denoising-Aware Inversion: Revealing Privacy Risks in Noise-Protected Text Embeddings

DAEI is proposed, a denoising-aware embedding inversion pipeline that combines a residual denoising autoencoder with generative text inversion where the denoiser is trained in an unsupervised manner using Stein's unbiased risk estimate to enable denoising from noisy observations alone.

Yubo Wang, Shujie Cui, James Bailey et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Abliteration Mitigation via Refusal Aliases

Abliteration, the removal of refusal capabilities from large language models by projecting weight matrices orthogonal to an extracted refusal direction, has emerged as a prominent safety concern through its ability to bypass post-training alignment using only a small set of contrastive prompts. We find that existing defenses commonly overlook the cause of abliteration; that is, how easily the refusal direction can be extracted. To hinder this process, we introduce a weight-editing method that obscures the refusal signal by applying rank-$k$ updates to residual stream writer matrices while replacing refusal-inducing activations with random aliases and correcting downstream reader matrices to preserve the model's original behavior. On Llama-3-8B, AMRA improves post-abliteration refusal scores by $2.16$ points over the undefended baseline with less than $0.5$ percentage points of MMLU degradation. On Gemma-2-9B, it improves the post-abliteration refusal by $14.70$ points over the baseline while keeping harmful output rates similar to the baseline, albeit at a greater utility cost.

Nathan Truong · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond the Transcript: Detecting Covert Co ordination in Latent Multi-Agent Communication

Verifiable Latent Alignments (VLA), an activation-aware framework for monitoring and steering these private communication channels, is introduced and shows that the evaluated private channel attacks can be monitored without training the primary monitor on attack examples and mitigated when matched counterfactual access is available.

Ramneet Kaur, Pradyumna Chari, Ramesh Raskar et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Evaluating Structured Information Extraction with Open Models in a High Risk Public Sector Application

The extraction of structured information from unstructured documents represents a critical component of digital transformations in all sectors. While proprietary solutions dominate commercial applications, a rapidly growing ecosystem of open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers accessible alternatives. However, systematic evaluations on realistic, multi-step extraction pipelines remain scarce. Responsible usage of such extraction tools require comprehensive evaluations on realistic tasks, especially as these solutions will be key components of applications in the public sector that the EU AI act categorizes as high risk. To address this gap we present a comprehensive benchmark assessing the end-to-end performance of open-source systems on a complex real-world document processing task classified as high risk: Student applications for an international study program. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation with state-of-the-art OCR engines, LLMs and VLMs. Our results reveal that while VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, even state-of-the-art open-source models struggle to handle such tasks reliably in zero-shot settings. Only 4 of 35 configurations achieved F1 scores above 0.5, with the best OCR+LLM pipeline matching top VLM performance, though most OCR+LLM combinations performed substantially worse. Roughly 75\% of all configurations scored below 0.25. Model scale influences performance, yet the relationship is non-linear: substantially larger models do not guarantee proportionally better results. Input quality, particularly the structural preservation of OCR output, emerges as a critical factor independent of downstream model capability.

Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Redakto - The Incognito Tab for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly used in everyday applications. A major challenge in the context of LLMs or Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general is to ensure privacy when using them, meaning that personally identifiable information (PII) is removed from any text that enters an LLM. These challenges have become more urgent with novel EU legislation. Uncertainty around LLM usage with respect to privacy concerns in EU countries can be a major blocker for the speed of innovation and transfer from research to applications. Here we present \textbf{Redakto}, a tool that can be used for anonymizing text prior to feeding it to an LLM or other downstream text processing. We provide state-of-the-art functionalities for both redaction of PII but also when used for pseudonymization. These functionalities are exposed such that they can easily be used by end-users, through the Redakto web application, and by developers and researchers, via REST APIs and model context protocol (MCP) hooks. The implementation is fully open source, requires modest compute resources, and can be readily deployed on local hardware. In contrast to prior work and in order to better assess the quality of the anonymized texts, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations on textual data from legal and medical domain with respect to both privacy and utility of the redacted texts. Our empirical results demonstrate that the texts anonymized with different redaction strategies achieve utility scores on par with the original texts, suggesting that anonymization with Redakto can be used for LLM tasks without substantial negative impact for the tasks we explored.

Saurav Kumar Saha, Tom R\"ohr, Felix Bie{\ss}mann · 0 citations

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