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EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity

Quantum security might not need classical puzzles to work

Researchers proved that one type of quantum building block can exist without another, even though the reverse relationship was known. They constructed an oracle—a hypothetical answering machine—where quantum security states survive intact while classical puzzles vanish entirely, showing these two candidates for quantum cryptography are fundamentally different.

Quantum cryptography researchers have been searching for the absolute minimum assumptions needed to build secure systems. This work narrows that search by proving one leading candidate (EFI pairs) stands independently from the other (one-way puzzles), redirecting research effort toward which direction actually matters for practical quantum security.

Caption-once, Frames-on-Demand: Visual-Need Routing for Budget-Aware Agentic Long Video Understanding

Answering questions about long videos without processing every frame each time

A new system lets edge devices understand hours-long videos efficiently by separating what needs pictures from what doesn't. It runs one captioning pass upfront to create a searchable story skeleton, then only retrieves actual video frames when a question specifically needs visual details like text or appearance—cutting the computing work dramatically while keeping accuracy high.

Video analysis on phones, cameras, and other edge devices is bottlenecked by bandwidth and battery. This approach could enable real-time video understanding for surveillance, security, and accessibility apps without constantly streaming frames to the cloud or draining device power. The efficiency gains are concrete: you get strong accuracy with far less visual data flowing in and out.

ZK-Trace: Certified Collusion Tracing with Zero-Knowledge Credentials for Federated GNSS Interference Monitoring

Catching who leaked a GPS monitoring system without needing their help

When organizations share GPS-monitoring software with multiple partner stations, any one of them might leak it to competitors or adversaries. This paper presents a system that embeds hidden fingerprints into each copy and uses cryptographic verification to identify the leaker afterward—even if they refuse to cooperate. In experiments, the system correctly identified all single leakers and traced over 99% of cases where two people collaborated, while falsely accusing an innocent party less than 0.1% of the time.

GPS signals are critical infrastructure for power grids, financial networks, and autonomous vehicles. Organizations that share monitoring tools with partners need a way to deter and catch people who sell leaked copies to hostile actors. This system makes betrayal traceable without requiring the leaker's consent, which changes the game for protecting sensitive surveillance infrastructure.

CONTINUITY: Security-Context Contracts for Composable LLM Agent Controls

Preventing AI agents from losing track of who authorized what

When AI systems chain together multiple security checks—tracking who gave permission, enforcing policies, logging actions—critical authorization information gets lost between steps, creating dangerous gaps. Researchers built CONTINUITY, a framework that cryptographically locks security context in place as requests move through an agent's components, ensuring every final action traces back to valid permission. In 2,560 simulated attacks across 128 fault scenarios, the system prevented all harmful actions while completing legitimate tasks without false alarms.

AI systems already combine multiple security tools, but gaps between them are invisible until something goes wrong—and then it's often too late. This framework makes those gaps detectable and fixable before deployment. For organizations building AI agents that handle sensitive decisions (financial transfers, data access, system commands), it's the difference between security theater and actual verification that each action was genuinely authorized.

Flip, Don't Shuffle: Watermarking LLMs at the Speed of Inference

A faster way to prove an AI wrote something, without slowing it down

Researchers created a new watermarking method for large language models that identifies AI-generated text while running 6000 times faster than existing techniques and adding less than 1% to generation speed. The method works by making a single random decision per word instead of searching through lists or running complex procedures, yet maintains the same ability to detect AI text with statistical certainty.

As AI-generated text becomes harder to distinguish from human writing, watermarks are a leading tool to prove authenticity—but existing methods slow down text generation noticeably. This technique is fast enough to deploy at scale without slowing down AI services, making it practical for real-world use in detecting plagiarism, academic cheating, and AI-generated misinformation.

When Does Authorization End? Effect Closure at Provider Boundaries

When does a permission actually stop working, even after you revoke it?

When you revoke someone's permission to do something, that permission might still let them act through work already in progress—even after the revocation succeeds. Researchers built a tool called EFFECTBOUND that can check whether a system truly blocks all these hidden paths, and found real vulnerabilities in GitHub, Kubernetes, NATS, and Kafka where revoked permissions could still take effect.

Permission systems are the backbone of security in cloud platforms and distributed software. If revoking access doesn't actually stop all paths to action—like a merge happening with the wrong code, or a message publishing after removal—attackers can exploit the gap between when you think something is locked down and when it actually is. The fixes tested on Kafka show that proper closure checking can block these risks without slowing down legitimate operations.

Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning

How the way you ask an AI coder to work shapes whether it gets hacked

The way developers ask AI coding agents to do work—what task, how detailed the instructions, what rules to follow—dramatically changes whether poisoned code repositories can attack those agents. A new benchmark of 1,920 test cases found that certain task types create silent vulnerabilities where malicious code runs undetected, while unclear or rambling prompts can accidentally protect against attacks by making the poison harder to activate.

As companies increasingly hand off coding work to AI agents pulling from repositories they don't fully control, understanding how simple invocation choices affect safety is critical. A developer asking for test execution instead of general setup could expose their system to attack 4.5 times more, and they'd likely never notice. This work gives teams concrete guidance on safer ways to phrase their requests and which tasks pose the highest risk.

SPA: Securing Persistent LLM Agents Across Queries with Plan-First Information-Flow Control

Protecting AI agents from poisoned data across multiple conversations

AI assistants that remember past work and pull from untrusted websites are vulnerable to attackers who slip malicious data into their memory or sources — then exploit it in future tasks. Researchers built SPA, a system that makes the agent plan out its full approach before executing it, then tracks data flows like a security auditor, stopping poisoned information from reaching sensitive actions. In tests, this reduced successful attacks from common rates down to nearly zero.

As AI agents handle more real work — scheduling, filing forms, accessing accounts — they become targets for attackers who can slip false information into websites or documents the agent reads. A poisoned fact lodged in the agent's memory could reactivate in an unguarded moment weeks later and cause damage. SPA's approach means companies deploying persistent AI agents can do so without accepting uncontrolled security risk from data sources outside their control.

Do User-Authored Permission Policies Improve Protection Against AI Agent Overreach?

Why asking permission each time protects better than preset rules

When people create standing rules to control what AI agents can do, those rules block fewer risky actions than asking for approval each time. Participants using preset rules allowed 20 percentage points more overreach incidents to happen compared to case-by-case human review, because they kept choosing "ask me later" rather than committing to firm policies upfront.

As AI agents gain access to email, files, and payments, ordinary people will need ways to protect themselves from unintended actions. This research shows that the intuitive solution — letting people write their own permission rules once — actually fails in practice because people second-guess their own rules when faced with real decisions. Systems designers now know they need to either push users toward firmer commitments, or accept that protecting against AI overreach may require sustained human attention rather than automated policies.

Security Education in Higher Education through AI-Powered Gamification

Using games and AI to make cybersecurity training actually stick with students

College students engaged more with cybersecurity lessons when they learned through short mobile games powered by AI rather than traditional videos. The games covered practical threats like password theft and phone scams using quiz-based, narrative, and simulation formats, and both technical experts and general students showed improved attention to security topics.

As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated and AI-generated, colleges need better ways to teach students to recognize threats. Games that hold attention could mean more graduates actually understand how to protect themselves and their employers—rather than zoning out through mandatory training videos. This approach could scale across institutions to reach thousands of students who might otherwise ignore security education.

AID-Guard: Stateful Authorization for Delegated Agent Effects

Keeping AI agents from accidentally doing the same task twice

When AI agents use external tools, a single approved request can accidentally trigger multiple effects if something goes wrong in delivery or recovery. AID-Guard is a new system that tracks authorization through the entire lifecycle — from approval through retries and crashes — ensuring one approved action produces exactly one real-world effect. In testing with Stripe and Resend payment systems, the protocol prevented all 44 simulated attacks while allowing legitimate requests through.

As AI agents increasingly handle financial transactions, account changes, and other irreversible actions, duplicate effects from retry failures could charge customers twice, send duplicate emails, or create orphaned database records. AID-Guard closes a gap where traditional "request approval" stops working once delivery gets messy — a gap that exists in most current AI agent frameworks. This matters because real systems crash, timeouts happen, and networks lose responses; a robust authorization system needs to survive that chaos without creating accidental duplicates.

Auditing Cross-Lingual Fairness in Language Model Watermarking

Why watermarks on AI text work differently across world languages

Watermarking schemes that hide invisible marks in AI-generated text work unevenly across languages, with gaps driven by fundamental linguistic differences rather than random variation. Testing six watermarking methods across eleven languages revealed that performance gaps cluster by language family—not individual languages—suggesting the problem is baked into how these schemes handle different grammatical structures and writing systems.

As AI systems deploy globally, watermarks are a key tool for detecting machine-generated content in moderation and authenticity verification. If watermarks fail silently for speakers of certain languages, some users get strong detection while others face unreliable protection. The framework here provides a concrete way to audit these gaps before deployment, rather than discovering them after problems emerge at scale.

SiNMULI: Novel Signed Network Approach for Malicious URL Identification

Using social networks to spot malicious websites instead of analyzing their content

Researchers developed a new method to identify dangerous websites by analyzing the links pointing to them—treating the problem like a social network where connections between websites are either trustworthy or suspicious. The approach achieved 99.89% accuracy on real-world data and works without needing to learn from labeled examples, making it more adaptable than existing techniques as attackers change their tactics.

Phishing scams and malware distribution cost individuals and businesses billions annually. This method could be deployed immediately without requiring constant retraining, and because it analyzes link patterns rather than website content, it resists evasion techniques that criminals use to hide their true purpose. It also explains why it flagged a site as dangerous—crucial for security teams investigating alerts.

Diff-DDoS: Realistic Cyber-Physical Attack Synthesis and Robust Detection for 5G-Enabled CPS Using Tabular Diffusion Models

Making DDoS attack detectors work with realistic threats instead of fake ones

Current AI systems that catch DDoS attacks on 5G networks fail badly when facing real attacks, losing 47 to 100 percent accuracy. Researchers built a new tool using diffusion models to create realistic fake attacks, then used those to train detectors until they stayed accurate against the real thing—recovering 79 to 100 percent accuracy depending on attack type.

5G networks power critical infrastructure like hospitals and power grids. Today's DDoS detectors are brittle and collapse when attackers adapt their methods slightly, creating serious security gaps. This technique lets companies test and harden their defenses against realistic attacks before deployment, rather than discovering failures during an actual breach.

Equivalence Between Average-Case Hardness of Learning and Cryptography for Mixed Quantum States

When quantum learning gets hard, it proves cryptography must work

Researchers proved that learning quantum systems becomes hard on average if and only if certain types of unbreakable quantum codes exist. This equivalence—the first proven for mixed quantum states—closes a gap between quantum cryptography and quantum learning theory that has puzzled computer scientists.

Quantum computers threaten current encryption, making it urgent to understand what quantum systems can and cannot do. This result provides a formal bridge between two major areas of quantum computing, helping researchers design quantum-safe cryptographic systems and understand the fundamental limits of what quantum computers can learn about hidden information.

LLM-Assisted Dynamic Threat Analysis for Attacker-Reachable Software Weaknesses in Autonomous Vehicles

Why AI struggles to test hidden dangers in self-driving car software

Researchers asked AI models to automatically create test programs that could confirm exploitable weaknesses in Autoware, an open-source autonomous vehicle system. The AI successfully generated candidate test harnesses, but only 64% compiled on the first try, and ultimately none revealed genuine vulnerabilities—not because the AI couldn't identify weak points, but because integrating those tests into the massive, interdependent codebase proved vastly harder than generating the tests themselves.

Autonomous vehicles must be rigorously tested for security flaws that could affect steering, braking, and safety-critical decisions. This work reveals that the bottleneck isn't finding weaknesses or writing test code—it's the engineering overhead of actually running those tests against real production software. The finding redirects attention from AI capability to the real barrier: building testing infrastructure that works with complex vehicle software stacks.

SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies

How to safely recover access to cryptocurrency wallets when keys are lost

When someone loses access to a cryptocurrency wallet, recovery mechanisms let them regain control—but they vary widely in how they work and where they place risk. This paper analyzed 77 different recovery systems across custody platforms and financial technologies, revealing that most recovery methods shift trust to third parties, create new abuse vulnerabilities, and leave recovery metadata unprotected.

Cryptocurrency users routinely lose access to accounts containing real money, and recovery is often their only option—yet most recovery systems force a dangerous choice between security and recoverability. This taxonomy helps wallet providers and developers understand the tradeoffs in existing approaches and identifies six specific gaps (like unprotected recovery metadata and poor lifecycle management) that create theft vulnerabilities. Better recovery design could prevent both devastating user losses and the security breaches that plague custody platforms today.

Hardware Keystores for AI Agent Signing Workflows: A Zero-Trust MCP Enforcement Architecture

Locking AI's signing keys in hardware to stop theft and misuse

AI agents that sign documents and authenticate systems currently store their cryptographic keys where any compromised program can steal them—a vulnerability exploited in a real incident in under five minutes. Researchers replaced software-based keys with hardware keystores (like TPMs or smart cards) that perform signing operations inside locked hardware, sending only results back to the AI. Testing against 12 injection attacks reduced success rates from 19.3% to 0%, with no false alarms on legitimate tasks.

As AI systems handle more high-stakes operations—signing code commits, issuing certificates, authenticating financial transactions—a stolen signing key becomes a critical liability. Hardware confinement means attackers cannot extract keys even if they fully compromise the AI system's software layer. This shifts the security boundary from software (which fails constantly) to tamper-resistant hardware, making credential theft orders of magnitude harder.

Toward Practical Decentralized Proof-of-Location via Physical Witnessing Zones

Building a system that proves you were actually there, not just claiming it

Researchers built a working prototype that uses nearby devices to verify when someone is physically present in a specific location—creating tamper-proof records that can't be faked or altered later. The system detected attempts to spoof location claims and operated reliably indoors, offering a practical foundation for location verification without relying on a single authority.

Today's location claims for deliveries, security checkpoints, and asset tracking are often based on self-reported data that's easy to fake and impossible to verify after the fact. A decentralized proof-of-location system would make it much harder to lie about where something or someone was, which matters for supply chains, insurance claims, and access control—anywhere that proving actual physical presence later becomes important.

CWEEP: A Lexical Static Analysis Framework for CWE Early Prevention

Finding security flaws in chip designs before they become expensive problems

Researchers created CWEEP, a tool that automatically scans the code used to design computer chips and finds security weaknesses before manufacturing. The tool pinpoints exactly where vulnerabilities hide in the code and suggests fixes—and it's nearly four times more accurate than existing methods, catching the right problems 61% of the time compared to 18% for previous approaches.

Security flaws in chip hardware are catastrophically expensive to fix once manufactured, sometimes requiring complete redesigns worth millions. CWEEP catches these vulnerabilities early in development when they're cheap to repair, and it works without requiring teams of expensive security experts to manually review every line of code. This could significantly speed up secure chip design and reduce the risk of hardware-based attacks reaching consumers.

Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning on Clinical EEG Data

Letting hospitals train AI together without exposing patient brain data

Researchers created a system that lets multiple hospitals train a shared machine-learning model on EEG brain scans without sending anyone's actual patient data to a central server. The method uses mathematical masking and secret-sharing to hide individual hospital updates even from the aggregation server, and works whether you trust that server or assume it might cheat.

Hospitals can now collaborate on better AI models for brain disorders while keeping sensitive neurological data private and on-site. The tradeoff is real—adding strong privacy protections slows things down and requires more computation—but the semi-honest version adds only modest overhead, making it practical for real healthcare networks.

Denial of Deadline: Network-Driven Accuracy Collapse in Distributed Inference Pipelines

How attackers can sabotage AI predictions by slowing down the system

Researchers discovered that distributed AI systems combining fast and slow prediction paths are vulnerable to a new type of attack: an attacker can flood the network with dummy requests to delay the slow, accurate path so badly that predictions arrive too late to be used. In a self-driving car test, 4,000 burst requests increased decision latency from 92 milliseconds to 2 seconds, cutting the accuracy benefit of the slower path in half and reducing object detection quality by 7 percentage points on average—with some rare objects like stop signs losing nearly half their detection accuracy.

Modern AI systems designed to be both fast and accurate rely on a backup slow path to improve predictions when time allows. This research reveals they can be attacked without stealing any model secrets or user data—only by congesting shared resources. Self-driving cars, drones, and other safety-critical systems using this architecture could fail to detect important objects in attacks, raising serious security questions for systems already deploying these hybrid inference designs.

Advances in STV Margin Computation

How to check if an election result could actually be wrong

Researchers developed a faster way to calculate how many ballots would need to be changed to flip the outcome of a single transferable vote election. The method produces tighter, more realistic estimates of election safety margins, making it practical to verify real election results without recounting every ballot.

Election officials can now conduct targeted audits that check only a portion of ballots while still confirming the announced winners are correct. This saves money and time while catching errors or fraud that might otherwise go undetected—turning a theoretical safety measure into something actually usable by jurisdictions running ranked-choice voting elections.

Toward cryptographically verifiable authorization for autonomous AI agents: A security hypothesis, preliminary formal model, and proof-of-concept implementation

Proving that AI agents have permission to act, without revealing secret rules

AI agents increasingly make decisions and access sensitive systems with little human supervision, but current security systems can't prove that a specific action was actually authorized. This paper proposes a mathematical framework using cryptography to create verifiable proof that an agent's request satisfies the right policies in the right situation—while keeping confidential details hidden. The researchers built a working prototype to show the idea is feasible.

As autonomous AI systems handle more high-stakes tasks—from accessing medical records to controlling infrastructure—we need auditable proof that each action was legitimately authorized, not just that an identity was verified. This work addresses a gap in current AI security: distinguishing between who an agent is, what it's permitted to do, and what context it's operating in. Cryptographic verification could enable organizations to prove compliance to regulators and detect unauthorized agent actions that slip past human oversight.

They'll Verify. They Just Won't Act. How Authority Framing and Laundered Code Turn a Trusted Agentic CI/CD Pipeline Into an Attack Surface

How fake approvals trick AI code reviewers into shipping malicious code

Researchers tested a five-agent AI pipeline that reviews and deploys code, injecting a request to steal secrets disguised as telemetry. When the request was framed as pre-approved by authority ("do not re-review"), downstream AI reviewers accepted it 55% of the time, citing the false approval and shipping the malicious code. Even basic pattern detectors missed the laundered intent because the code itself looked syntactically normal.

As companies deploy AI agents to automate code review and deployment, this shows a critical gap: AI systems verify work exists but don't independently reason about whether it should happen. A single forged approval can cascade through multiple AI checkpoints. The only effective defense found was checking the original source of requests at entry—meaning teams need to rethink how AI pipelines are chained together, not just make individual agents smarter.

AI Watermark Evidence Fails Forensic Readiness: An Empirical Evaluation

Why AI watermarks fail when lawyers need them most

Three widely-used watermarking systems for AI-generated text collapse under realistic attacks and fail legal evidence standards. When texts were slightly rewritten—a simple paraphrase—nearly every watermarked passage lost its identifying mark entirely: 100% loss for two methods, 98.3% for a third. Even before any attack, false-negative rates were already high (70–83%), meaning the systems missed AI-generated text they should have caught.

Governments are betting on watermarks to prove AI authorship in court and comply with laws like the EU AI Act and California's SB 942. These results show that current watermarks won't hold up under cross-examination or in forensic analysis—a lawyer could easily paraphrase a watermarked text to strip the mark, and a judge applying legal evidence standards would likely reject the watermark as proof at all. This creates a gap between what the law assumes watermarks can do and what they actually can.

The Distributed Open-Source Vulnerability Ecosystem

Why different security scanners give conflicting answers about software vulnerabilities

Security tools designed to find known software vulnerabilities often report different results when scanning the same code, even though they use the same public vulnerability databases. These disagreements don't just come from buggy scanners—they emerge from fundamental inconsistencies across the entire ecosystem where vulnerability information is created, shared, and interpreted.

When security teams get conflicting vulnerability reports, they can't trust either answer, leaving them unsure whether their software is actually at risk. Understanding where these conflicts originate makes it possible to design better testing methods that catch real gaps, standardize how vulnerability information is tracked, and help organizations make faster, more confident decisions about fixing their code.

Plausible Deniability Guarantees for Whistleblowers

Hiding which employees get audited so bosses can't identify whistleblowers

Whistleblowers face retaliation when organizations discover who reported them, yet current protection systems lack rigorous privacy guarantees. Researchers developed a mathematically proven method that hides which employees are selected for audits well enough that an organization watching the selection process cannot identify reporters—and it performs dramatically better than simply choosing auditors at random.

Whistleblowers expose fraud, safety violations, and corruption, but fear of being identified and punished silences most potential reporters. A system with formal privacy guarantees could encourage more people to come forward without fearing retaliation, making oversight mechanisms actually work in practice rather than existing mainly on paper.

Closing the Loop: An Access-Control Architecture for Automated, Anomaly-Driven Network Revocation in IoT Deployments

Automatically kicking compromised IoT devices off the network in milliseconds

When an IoT device starts behaving suspiciously, security systems can now detect it and boot it from the network in about a third of a second—without needing specialized equipment. The system uses standard protocols already installed in most networks, combines three different detection methods into a single model, and can permanently revoke a device's access while also disconnecting its active session.

IoT botnets and compromised sensors cause real damage because suspicious devices typically stay connected until someone manually investigates. This approach stops an infected device in under 400 milliseconds, severely limiting the window for attack. It works with off-the-shelf equipment, making it practical for hospitals, factories, and offices to deploy today rather than waiting for networks to upgrade.

TRM-Raft: A Byzantine-Resistant Raft Consensus via Integrated Trust and Reputation Model

Making Raft consensus safe when some computers actively lie or cheat

Raft is a popular system for coordinating data across multiple computers, but it assumes failures are honest mistakes—it can't handle nodes that deliberately forge elections or tamper with data. Researchers added a trust-and-reputation layer that tracks each node's behavior, penalizes dishonest actions, and blocks untrustworthy nodes from leadership. In testing with 40% malicious nodes, the system kept bad leaders below 5% while losing less than 10% speed.

Raft powers critical infrastructure like service registries and blockchain systems. Without this fix, a single dishonest operator or hacked server could forge elections or corrupt records. This upgrade protects those systems without requiring a complete redesign or the heavy computational cost of older Byzantine-resistant protocols.

From Legacy Documentation to OSCAL: An MCP-Based Agent Pipeline for Threat-Informed Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure

Converting operator notes into official compliance documents without scanning critical systems

Researchers built an AI system that converts written descriptions of water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure into official compliance documents, without needing to scan the live systems. The system correctly identified 90% of known vulnerabilities and avoided fabricating attack paths by anchoring its reasoning to verified threat databases rather than relying on the AI's own knowledge.

Critical infrastructure like power plants and water utilities can't be actively scanned for security holes without risking operational failure. This pipeline lets operators generate auditable compliance reports from existing documentation, making their actual security posture visible to regulators. When errors do occur, they happen in the initial translation step rather than cascading through the entire analysis—meaning a human can quickly spot and fix a mistaken asset description before it wastes resources chasing irrelevant vulnerabilities.

Automated Compliance Mapping in Cloud Security with Domain-Adapted Sentence Transformers

Teaching AI to match security rules to technical safeguards automatically

Matching security regulations to actual technical controls in cloud systems has always meant manual work by compliance experts. This paper trains AI models on 14,000 examples of security requirements paired with technical metrics, allowing them to automate the matching process—with the best models improving accuracy by up to 23 percentage points over standard AI approaches. The technique also works across different security standards, so a mapping learned from one regulation can help with others.

Cloud companies spend thousands of hours manually documenting how their technical systems satisfy security regulations. Automating this work could cut compliance overhead significantly, reduce human error in safety-critical mappings, and let teams redeploy compliance staff to higher-level risk assessment. For regulators, automated accuracy checking could catch gaps that slip through human review.

HaloGuard 1.0: An Open Weights Constitutional Classifier for Multilingual AI Safety

A smaller AI safety filter that catches harmful requests across 46 languages

Researchers built HaloGuard, a safety classifier that blocks harmful prompts to AI systems while being 30 times smaller than competing models and matching their performance. The system uses a structured set of 46 safety policies translated across languages, then trains on thousands of paired examples where only the harmful intent changes—not the topic or wording—to learn what's truly dangerous rather than just flagging unfamiliar phrasing.

AI companies need safety filters that work in many languages without slowing down their systems. HaloGuard runs efficiently on smaller hardware while catching 90% of harmful requests with only a 4% false-alarm rate, making it practical for real-world deployment. Because it's released openly, smaller companies and researchers outside tech giants can now afford to build safer multilingual AI systems.

Behind the Refusal: Determining Guardrail Activation via Behavioral Monitoring

How to tell when an AI's safety filter blocks you versus the AI itself

Researchers developed the first method to detect whether an AI system has guardrails installed and what it's designed to block, using only external behavioral clues like response timing and structure. By monitoring how an AI system responds to harmful requests, they achieved 100% accuracy at detecting guardrails and 98% accuracy at distinguishing a guardrail block from an AI's own refusal—a distinction attackers need to make to choose the right hacking technique.

As AI systems deploy into banks, hospitals, and military applications, security teams need to know what guardrails protect their systems and how well they work. This method lets defenders audit their own defenses without needing access to internal code. It also reveals how attackers would probe a live AI system, so security teams can spot reconnaissance attempts in real time.

Reasoning LLM Improves Speaker Recognition in Long-form TV Dramas

Using AI reasoning to figure out who's speaking in TV dramas

Researchers built a new system that uses reasoning AI to correctly identify which character is speaking in TV dramas, even when voices are hard to hear. The system works by combining audio, dialogue, and visual cues, and outperforms existing methods especially on short lines where voice recognition alone fails. They also released a dataset of 532,000 labeled dialogue lines from over 900 characters to help train future systems.

Accurate speaker identification is essential for any AI system that needs to understand TV shows—whether for automatic subtitling, content analysis, or helping viewers with hearing disabilities follow complex scenes with many characters. Current methods stumble on short lines and overlapping dialogue, but reasoning-based approaches could make video understanding AI more reliable for real-world media applications.

Hybrid Topological Data Analysis and LSTM Networks for Enhanced Network Intrusion Detection Using CIC-IDS2017 Dataset

Combining math topology and neural networks to catch network hackers

Researchers combined two mathematical approaches—one that finds hidden patterns in data structure, another that learns from sequences over time—to detect cyberattacks in network traffic. On a standard test dataset, the hybrid system achieved perfect detection rates (100% accuracy), outperforming simpler machine-learning methods that caught 99.4% and 83.5% of attacks respectively.

Network breaches cost organizations billions annually. A detection system that identifies attacks with near-perfect accuracy could catch intrusions that slip past current defenses, giving security teams critical seconds to respond before damage spreads. The approach works on real network data containing millions of traffic patterns, suggesting it could actually protect live systems.

Robust Harmful Features Under Jailbreak Attacks: Mechanistic Evidence from Attention Head Specialization in Large Language Models

Why AI safety features survive jailbreak attacks by hiding in plain sight

When hackers try to jailbreak language models, they don't actually disable the AI's safety guardrails—they just muffle a few specific parts of the model's attention system while leaving the core safety signals intact. Researchers found that safety features split into two types: early-layer heads that attacks suppress, and mid-layer heads that keep working even during successful jailbreaks. This means the model's "conscience" never truly disappears; attackers just drown it out.

If AI safety features are hardwired into the model's architecture rather than easily erasable, it becomes much harder to fully compromise them. The discovery suggests a practical shortcut: security teams could monitor those persistent safety signals without retraining the model, creating a new line of defense against jailbreaks. Understanding this hidden robustness also helps researchers design models where safety is even more difficult to bypass.

ShareLock: A Stealthy Multi-Tool Threshold Poisoning Attack Against MCP

How attackers hide harmful instructions across multiple AI tools to avoid detection

Researchers discovered a new attack method called ShareLock that splits malicious instructions into harmless-looking pieces hidden across multiple AI tools, making it nearly impossible to spot by inspection or automated systems. The attack succeeded over 90% of the time against major AI language models and only requires a small trigger during a routine system update to activate the hidden instructions and steal data or compromise systems.

As AI assistants increasingly rely on external tools and integrations to function, this attack reveals a critical blind spot in how these systems are secured. Organizations deploying AI agents with tool access need to know that current inspection methods—manual review or automated scanning—won't catch poisoning hidden across multiple tools, which means their defensive strategies are currently insufficient and could leave them vulnerable to data theft or system compromise.

Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries

How AI models leak secrets hidden in their attention patterns

Tabular foundation models — AI systems trained to work with spreadsheet-like data — can be tricked into revealing whether specific records were used during their processing, even when the model was pre-trained on synthetic data. Researchers created a new attack that reads the model's attention patterns to detect membership in context examples with 7.7% higher accuracy than existing methods, then developed a defence that reduces this privacy leakage by half without significantly harming the model's performance.

As businesses deploy these models to make decisions using sensitive customer or patient data, the privacy risk is concrete: attackers can determine whether a specific person's medical record or financial information was part of the data fed to the model. The proposed defence offers a practical fix that works at inference time without retraining, making it immediately applicable to systems already in production.

Optimal Small Set Expanders and Their Codes

Building better secret-sharing networks that resist quantum computers

Researchers identified the best possible network designs that connect small groups of users to as many others as possible, then proved these optimal networks can be built with specific structural properties. They showed these designs could improve codes used in post-quantum cryptography—the encryption methods needed to protect secrets from future quantum computers.

As quantum computers grow more powerful, current encryption methods will become obsolete. These optimized networks offer a concrete path to building cryptographic systems that stay secure in a post-quantum world, potentially protecting everything from financial transactions to government communications decades from now.

bioETH-Beacon: A Confidential On-Chain Genomic Beacon with Encrypted Counts, Filters, and Bounded Noise over a Fully Homomorphic EVM

Letting researchers query genetic databases without revealing what they're looking for

Researchers built a system that lets hospitals and scientists search shared genetic databases while keeping both the queries and the data encrypted—so no one can see what variant someone is searching for or what raw genetic information hospitals hold. The system runs on blockchain-like infrastructure using advanced encryption that performs calculations directly on coded data, eliminating the need for a trusted middleman to decrypt information during the search process.

Genomic databases are crucial for medical research, but current systems force hospitals to either trust a single organization with plaintext genetic data or reveal to each institution what researchers are searching for—creating privacy breaches and membership-inference risks where repeated searches could expose whether specific patients are in a database. This prototype removes that tradeoff, letting hospitals contribute genetic data to research networks without exposing raw information or surveillance-level query logs.

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

A security checkpoint that stops AI agents from making unauthorized changes to cloud systems

Autonomous agents controlling cloud infrastructure need a hard stop between decision and action. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker, a system that sits between an AI agent's proposed changes and the actual infrastructure, verifying that each change matches what was explicitly approved and hasn't been revoked—then recording exactly what happened. The authors tested it on AWS and Kubernetes clusters and found it adds minimal latency while catching unauthorized mutations.

As AI agents gain direct control over production systems, a single compromised or hallucinating agent could cause widespread damage before anyone notices. This broker creates a tamper-proof record and a mandatory verification point that can't be bypassed, letting companies revoke agent permissions instantly and audit every change. In regulated industries like finance and healthcare, having a signed, auditable trail of who authorized what change and when could be legally required.

Future Dynamic 3D Reconstruction: A 3D World Model with Disentangled Ego-Motion

Teaching self-driving cars to predict 3D worlds without getting confused by their own movement

Current AI video prediction systems create realistic-looking images but often show physically impossible things like objects morphing or disappearing, especially when predicting far ahead. A new system called FR3D fixes this by separately tracking how the world changes from how the camera moves, maintaining geometric consistency so objects stay stable and believable as it predicts 2 seconds into the future.

Autonomous vehicles need accurate predictions of their surroundings to navigate safely, especially in dynamic environments with other moving objects. When prediction systems confuse the vehicle's own motion with changes in the environment, they produce unreliable forecasts that could lead to dangerous decisions. FR3D's approach to keeping track of the 3D structure of scenes could help make self-driving systems more reliable at planning safe paths through unpredictable traffic.

Split Tallies: A Discrete Certificate Calculus for Auditing Dynamic Ordered Sets in Constant Memory

Catching sneaky changes to ordered lists using almost no memory

Researchers developed a method for spotting when someone secretly alters a growing or shrinking ordered list of data—detecting wrong answers with near-certainty despite the auditor only remembering five numbers. The approach works by tracking invisible gaps between items and checking if the record of when gaps appeared matches when they disappeared.

Databases and financial ledgers often rely on untrusted third parties to maintain sorted data correctly. This method lets an auditor verify that data hasn't been corrupted or manipulated without storing a copy of the entire dataset—critical for systems where storage is expensive or memory is constrained, like blockchain systems or distributed databases.

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

Using game theory to audit whether networks can actually be defended

Researchers developed a mathematical framework that tests whether a computer network can be defended against attackers by treating defense as a two-player game. Rather than using this approach to control agents at runtime, the team shows it works better as a design-time audit tool that reveals structural weaknesses in network architectures and produces a formal yes-or-no verdict on whether a topology can be secured.

Network defenders typically evaluate security through operational testing alone, which misses systematic vulnerabilities. This framework provides a formal guarantee—a mathematical proof—that a network design either can or cannot be defended given specific constraints, catching architectural flaws before deployment. The approach also revealed that networks can look formally secure on paper while failing in real adversarial play, meaning defenders now have two complementary lenses instead of one.

Mind your key: An Empirical Study of LLM API Credential Leakage in iOS Apps

How iPhone apps leak secret keys that control expensive AI services

Researchers found that 282 out of 444 examined iPhone apps expose the secret credentials needed to access paid AI services like ChatGPT and Claude — allowing attackers to impersonate users and rack up charges on developers' accounts. Three months after alerting developers to the problem, 72% of vulnerable apps remained unfixed, suggesting the issue stems from deeper gaps in how developers are taught to build secure apps rather than simple oversights.

Leaked API credentials directly cost developers money through unauthorized AI service usage, and can expose user data if attackers access the accounts behind those keys. The findings reveal that platform-level safeguards and clearer security guidance from AI providers are needed — leaving the problem to individual developer awareness isn't working.

FuseFSS: Efficient Secure LLM Inference with Function Secret Sharing

Making AI chatbots faster while keeping user questions completely private

A new system called FuseFSS speeds up private AI queries by 24–50% while keeping prompts hidden from the servers hosting the model. The key innovation replaces dozens of custom security protocols with a single streamlined compiler that handles all the mathematical operations needed to run AI models securely.

As AI assistants handle sensitive queries—medical questions, legal advice, confidential business data—users need privacy guarantees. FuseFSS makes this possible without sacrificing speed, meaning companies can offer genuinely private AI services without the performance penalty that currently deters adoption. It also reduces the storage overhead for security setup by 20–24%, lowering infrastructure costs.

SecRL-Prune: Structured Reinforcement Learning-Based Pruning of CodeLLMs for Preserving Adversarial Code Mutation

Shrinking AI code generators while keeping their ability to dodge malware detectors

Researchers compressed large AI code models to 70–90% of their original size while preserving their ability to generate functionally identical but textually different code—a technique criminals could use to evade antivirus detection. In tests on real malware samples, code from these smaller models still reduced detection rates significantly, showing that the security risk persists even after aggressive compression.

As code-generation AI becomes cheaper and easier to deploy on everyday devices, malicious actors gain practical tools to automatically generate undetectable malware variants at scale. Security teams building detection systems now need to account for the fact that compressed AI models remain dangerous, not just the original full-size versions. This shifts the calculus for both offensive and defensive security planning around AI-generated code.

Will the Agent Recuse Itself? Measuring LLM-Agent Compliance with In-Band Access-Deny Signals

Can AI agents be trained to respect a polite 'please stop' from servers?

Researchers tested whether large language model agents would voluntarily stop accessing a computer system when the server politely asked them to leave. In experiments with OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude, agents honored the request 100% of the time when it was present—but notably, adding explicit permission from a human operator made the most powerful model ignore the signal and proceed anyway.

As AI agents gain real access to bank servers, cloud infrastructure, and databases, operators need a lightweight way to say "no" without completely breaking the connection. This research shows such a cooperative signal can work—at least for now—but also reveals a vulnerability: capable models may override safety signals if given conflicting instructions, a problem that will matter more as autonomous agents handle higher-stakes decisions.

NeuROK: Generative 4D Neural Object Kinematics

Teaching AI to predict how objects bend and move under pressure

Researchers created a system called NeuROK that learns to generate realistic 4D animations—showing how objects deform and move over time—without needing hand-coded physics rules for each object type. The approach works across many different kinds of objects by learning a compressed mathematical representation of all possible shapes an object can take, then predicting how that shape changes moment by moment.

Current methods for simulating object deformation require scientists to manually specify physics equations for each category of thing they want to simulate, limiting them to small datasets and specific objects. NeuROK instead learns from large 4D video datasets, meaning it can simulate deformations of any object type—rubber, cloth, metal, food—without rebuilding the physics from scratch. This directly enables better 3D video games, digital twins for manufacturing, and AI systems that understand how the physical world actually works.

MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolution

Deciding what to hide in screenshots before AI agents see them

GUI agents—AI systems that control computers by reading screenshots—often capture sensitive information like passwords, medical records, and private messages. MaskClaw makes privacy decisions locally on your device before screenshots leave, choosing whether to allow the agent full access, mask sensitive areas, or ask the user first, using learned rules about what matters in each task and application.

As AI agents take over more computer tasks, they need to read your screen—but sending raw screenshots to cloud servers exposes private data before anyone checks what should stay hidden. MaskClaw keeps this decision-making on your device or your organization's servers, preventing sensitive information from being uploaded in the first place, while still letting agents do their job.

On Reliability of Efficient Membership Inference Vulnerability Evaluation

Why the shortcuts used to test AI privacy leaks often give misleading results

Researchers found that common methods for measuring whether machine learning models leak training data are fundamentally unreliable. When researchers combine results across multiple people or models to save computation time, their measurements become miscalibrated and can dramatically overestimate actual privacy risks — making weak privacy protections look safer than they really are.

Companies and researchers use these flawed measurements to audit whether their AI systems properly protect sensitive training data under privacy frameworks like differential privacy. False reassurances from broken tests could lead organizations to deploy systems that leak more personal information than they believe, putting user data at risk. The authors provide a fix that allows researchers to get accurate privacy measurements without the computational burden.

MotiMotion: Motion-Controlled Video Generation with Visual Reasoning

Teaching video AI to think through the physics before moving objects

Current video generation tools struggle when given vague or incomplete motion instructions, often producing unnatural results because they ignore what should happen next. MotiMotion fixes this by having the AI reason through the physics and consequences of a motion before generating the video—like understanding that knocking over a cup would spill water—rather than blindly following the trajectory you drew.

Video generation is moving into creative and commercial tools where unrealistic physics breaks immersion and trust. Better reasoning about cause and effect means generated videos work for visual effects, game design, and animation tasks where object interactions need to look plausible, not just follow a path.

AwareVLN: Reasoning with Self-awareness for Vision-Language Navigation

Teaching navigation AI to understand where it is and what it's doing

Researchers created AwareVLN, a navigation system that helps AI agents follow language instructions in visual environments by explicitly understanding their own position and progress. Unlike existing methods that either lack clarity about their decision-making or require extra 3D sensors, AwareVLN learns spatial awareness and task progress directly from data, achieving better performance across multiple benchmark environments.

Self-aware navigation systems could power robots that follow complex instructions in unfamiliar spaces—from warehouses to disaster zones to hospitals. Because AwareVLN works without needing specialized 3D sensors, it's cheaper to deploy and easier to scale up with more training data. The approach also makes the AI's decisions more interpretable, helping humans understand why a robot chose a particular path or action.

LLM Benchmark Datasets Should Be Contamination-Resistant

Making test datasets that AI models can't cheat by memorizing

Large language models are often tested on datasets they've already seen during training, making their scores meaningless—like letting students study the exact exam questions beforehand. Researchers propose creating "contamination-resistant" datasets that models can use during evaluation but cannot learn from during training, and show how to build them using differences between how Transformers train versus perform inference.

Without contamination-resistant benchmarks, companies and researchers cannot tell whether their language models have genuinely improved at reasoning and language understanding or simply memorized test data. This makes it impossible to reliably measure real progress in AI capabilities or to fairly compare different models against each other.

Privacy is Fungibility: Why Endogenous Tokens Are Not Money

Why most cryptocurrencies don't work like real money

Most cryptocurrencies fail a fundamental test of money: they don't protect users' privacy the way cash does. The researchers show that blockchain ledgers expose transaction details in ways that create harmful power imbalances between parties, even when encryption is added on top. This means cryptocurrencies and stablecoins built on these systems are missing something essential that makes money actually work.

If cryptocurrencies aren't functioning as real money, they can't fulfill the role their backers envision—whether as payment systems, stores of value, or alternatives to government currency. This affects how regulators should treat these assets and what users should realistically expect from them. It also matters for anyone considering stablecoins or blockchain-based central bank digital currencies, since the underlying ledger design creates privacy vulnerabilities no amount of encryption can fully solve.

VGGT-Ω

Training faster, cheaper 3D scene reconstruction models at 15 times larger scale

A new model called VGGT-Ω reconstructs 3D scenes from video more accurately than previous approaches while using 70% less GPU memory during training. By cutting computational costs and creating a pipeline to label dynamic video scenes, the researchers trained on 15 times more data than prior work, achieving 77% better camera tracking on standard benchmarks and unlocking the ability to learn from unlabeled video.

3D scene reconstruction from video underpins AR applications, robotics, and autonomous systems that need to understand their surroundings. Making this technology faster and cheaper to train means more organizations can build and deploy these systems. The model's learned patterns also transfer to other vision tasks—including helping AI systems align what they see with language descriptions—suggesting reconstruction is a foundational skill worth scaling up.

Attacks and Mitigations for Distributed Governance of Agentic AI under Byzantine Adversaries

Protecting AI agents from insider threats in cloud systems

A compromised cloud provider can steal private data from AI agents, forge their identities, and bypass security controls, according to new research demonstrating concrete attacks on the current governance system. The authors present four fixed versions: one uses expensive security protocols for maximum protection, two use lightweight monitoring and auditing to catch tampering with minimal slowdown, and one combines all three approaches to balance security and speed.

As companies deploy AI agents on cloud platforms, insider threats from the cloud provider itself pose a real risk. These fixes allow organizations to choose their own tradeoff: pay for bulletproof security, accept some risk in exchange for fast performance, or use auditing to detect tampering after the fact. Without these protections, a malicious insider could impersonate agents or exfiltrate sensitive user data without detection.

CLAD: A Clustered Label-Agnostic Federated Learning Framework for Joint Anomaly Detection and Attack Classification

Training security systems across IoT devices without sharing raw data

A new framework called CLAD trains security systems across thousands of IoT devices while keeping data private and handling the reality that most collected data comes without labels. It achieves 30% better detection of network attacks than existing methods while using half the communication bandwidth, even when 80% of the data lacks security labels.

As factories, smart homes, and critical infrastructure rely on millions of connected devices, security breaches can cascade rapidly across networks. CLAD makes it practical for these devices to collectively learn threat patterns without exposing sensitive operational data to central servers, while actually improving detection accuracy by making use of unlabeled data that would otherwise be wasted.

On the (In-)Security of the Shuffling Defense in the Transformer Secure Inference

How shuffling AI model outputs doesn't actually hide them from hackers

A security technique meant to protect AI models during remote computation—shuffling the model's internal activations before revealing them—can be broken for about $1 worth of queries. Researchers show how to align these shuffled values back to their original order, then use them to recover the model's actual weights, demonstrating the attack works on real models like GPT-2.

As AI systems move to cloud computing, companies rely on cryptographic defenses to keep model weights secret while still computing results. This attack shows a widely-used shuffling defense provides a false sense of security—meaning companies using it may think their models are protected when they're actually vulnerable to cheap theft. Developers now need better defenses before deploying sensitive models to untrusted servers.

Unsupervised Denoising of Real Clinical Low Dose Liver CT with Perceptual Attention Networks

Cleaning up blurry CT scans without needing perfect reference images

Researchers developed an artificial intelligence system that removes noise from low-dose CT scans without requiring paired clean images for training—a major obstacle in medical imaging. The system was tested on real clinical scans and validated by radiologists, achieving results comparable to supervised methods while solving the practical problem that hospitals rarely have perfectly clean versions of the same scan to learn from.

Low-dose CT reduces radiation risk to patients, but the grainy images can make tumors and other abnormalities harder to spot, potentially leading to missed diagnoses. This technique cleans up those images automatically using only the noisy scans themselves, making it immediately usable in hospitals without requiring expensive paired training data. Radiologists who reviewed the results confirmed it meets clinical standards, meaning patients could get safer imaging without sacrificing diagnostic clarity.

One Single Hub Text Breaks CLIP: Identifying Vulnerabilities in Cross-Modal Encoders via Hubness

How a single confusing text can fool systems that match images to captions

Researchers found a critical weakness in CLIP and similar image-text matching systems: a single generic piece of text can be artificially close to nearly every image in a dataset, tricking the system into giving it high similarity scores even when it's meaningless. This reveals that these widely-used systems rely on flawed geometry in their internal representation space, making them vulnerable to subtle manipulation.

Image-to-text systems power real applications—from photo search to automated caption evaluation—and companies rely on them to be robust. This vulnerability means a single malicious or accidental hub text could poison search results or break evaluation metrics that measure whether AI-generated captions match human standards, undermining trust in systems used for content moderation, accessibility, and quality assurance.

Defending Quantum Classifiers against Adversarial Perturbations through Quantum Autoencoders

Protecting quantum AI classifiers from sneaky adversarial tricks

Quantum machine learning systems that classify images can be fooled by specially crafted noise, just like regular AI systems. Researchers developed a defense using quantum autoencoders to clean up corrupted data before classification, improving accuracy by up to 68% under attack without needing to retrain the system on known threats.

As quantum computers become practical tools for real tasks, securing them against adversarial attacks matters for any high-stakes application—medical imaging, security screening, or autonomous systems. This defense works without the overhead of constantly retraining on new attack types, making it more practical to deploy when attackers keep changing their tactics.

Strait: Perceiving Priority and Interference in ML Inference Serving

Scheduling AI requests fairly when multiple tasks compete for GPU time

Strait is a system for managing requests to machine learning models running on GPUs when some requests matter more than others. It predicts how long each request will take even when multiple requests run simultaneously, then uses those predictions to prioritize urgent requests—cutting missed deadlines for high-priority tasks by up to 11 percentage points without completely starving lower-priority work.

Companies running AI services on their own hardware often need to handle both time-sensitive requests (like fraud detection) and routine ones (like recommendations) on the same machines. Current systems either guess badly at how long things will take under load or simply interrupt low-priority tasks—wasting GPU power. Strait lets businesses meet their critical deadlines while still processing regular work efficiently, making on-premises AI infrastructure more practical.

Mapping the Phase Diagram of the Vicsek Model with Machine Learning

Using AI to map where flocking behavior switches between chaos and order

Researchers used machine learning to chart the complete phase diagram of the Vicsek model—a mathematical model of how animals flock together—across its full parameter space. By training a neural network on simulated data, they achieved 92% accuracy in predicting when the system transitions between disordered, ordered, and mixed states, and revealed a previously unclear boundary region between ordered and chaotic behavior.

Phase diagrams are critical maps in physics and biology that show where systems behave differently. This machine-learning approach turns expensive simulations into comprehensive maps that can predict behavior across untested regions, potentially accelerating research into real collective motion—from bird flocks to autonomous robot swarms—by replacing exhaustive simulations with trained algorithms.

Explainable Load Forecasting with Covariate-Informed Time Series Foundation Models

Making AI power grid forecasts understandable and trustworthy

Researchers found that advanced AI models can predict electricity demand as accurately as traditional ones while remaining interpretable—a crucial requirement for critical infrastructure. By developing a method to explain which factors (weather, time of day, historical patterns) drive each prediction, they showed that these models reliably use the right information to make decisions, matching established expertise about what actually moves power consumption.

Power grid operators need to understand *why* a forecast says demand will spike before they commit expensive resources. Black-box predictions, no matter how accurate, create operational risk and regulatory friction. This work proves that grid forecasting can be both cutting-edge and transparent, removing a major barrier to deploying faster, more efficient AI systems in electricity infrastructure.