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CategoryAll Vulnerability 1166 Ransomware 1109 Industry 871 Malware 861 Policy & legal 741 Exploit / PoC 713 Threat actor 500 Data breach 478 Phishing & fraud 360 Research 287 AI tools & infra 113 AI safety & security 97 Advisory 91 AI industry 77

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Large Universe Subset Predicate Encryption with IND-CCA Security (with Constant-size Ciphertext and Keys)

New construction achieves first large-universe subset predicate encryption with IND-CCA security and constant-size ciphertexts and keys under subgroup decision assumptions.

The paper proposes the first large-universe subset predicate encryption scheme achieving IND-CCA security with both constant-size ciphertexts and constant-size secret keys. Prior large-universe constructions by Chatterjee and Mukherjee either achieved only restricted selective security with constant sizes or adaptive security with attribute-dependent ciphertext size, and none achieved CCA security. The new construction is proven selectively secure under standard subgroup decision problems. Black-box transformations yield the first CCA-secure WIBE and WKD-IBE with constant-size ciphertexts and keys.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 10:02 UTC · 3d agoResearch

Memory-Efficient Designs for Word-Wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption

BXT framework mitigates FHE memory bottlenecks via ciphertext compression, serialization, delayed seeding, and digit pruning, achieving up to 3.8x CNN inference speedup.

A new paper proposes BXT, an optimization framework for word-wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption that targets the memory bottleneck rather than compute. It combines four techniques: ciphertext compression via seed regeneration, bit-packed ciphertext serialization for L2-to-L1 transfers, delayed PRNG-heavy offline seed generation across aggregated operations, and fault-aware ciphertext digit pruning. On CNN inference, the BXT-CSO50 configuration achieves up to 3.8x speedup over a 100x GPU baseline with under 1% accuracy loss at 50% comparison precision.

arXiv cs.CRSep 4, 06:03 UTC · 13d agoResearch

Can your coding style predict whether your code is vulnerable?

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth researchers present VulStyle, a stylometry-based vulnerability detector that also exposes benchmark reliability problems.

VulStyle combines stylometric features with syntax-tree structure and source tokens, pre-trained on about 4.9 million functions across seven programming languages and fine-tuned on five vulnerability detection datasets. It beat token-only detectors on some benchmarks but its F1 drops sharply on DiverseVul, which the authors link to noisy labels inflating reported performance across popular datasets. The authors argue style-aware detection should be harder to evade but did not test this empirically, and they note that uniform LLM-generated code may strip away the individual developer style the model depends on.

Help Net SecurityAug 24, 04:21 UTC · 24d agoResearch1

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · securitySep 9, 06:47 UTC · 8d agoResearch

Researchers built a $7 gadget for anyone paranoid about hidden cameras in hotel rooms

KAIST-led researchers built SweepLED, a sub-$7 smartphone LED clip using AI to detect hidden cameras with 93.9-95.1% accuracy.

SweepLED, built by KAIST with the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University, clips 15 LEDs to a smartphone camera and sweeps multi-angle light while the phone films reflections. A spatio-temporal AI model compares LED-on and LED-off frames to distinguish lens reflections from glossy surfaces across three viewpoints. Testing on 30 objects, 12 with hidden cameras, achieved 93.9% accuracy handheld and 95.1% static. Core components cost under $7, targeting privacy checks in hotels and short-term rentals.

Help Net SecuritySep 3, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoResearch1

Autonomy in Check: Governor-Mediated Adaptive Security at the Edge

Split-control architecture adds a deterministic governor to validate LLM and rule-based planner intents before eBPF enforcement at the edge.

Researchers propose a split-control edge security architecture in which an untrusted planner emits typed security intents that a deterministic governor checks against safety, resource, temporal-stability, and proportionality invariants. Admitted actions are bound to signed receipts and compiled into pre-installed eBPF map updates. A Raspberry Pi 5 prototype on a university 5G test network admitted, rejected, and bounded intents at microsecond cost.

arXiv cs.CRSep 16, 09:00 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Sociotechnical Aspects of Tor Relay Rejection

User study and simulations of Tor's relay end-of-life rejection policy find operators favor it; network churn affects anonymity more than EoL exclusions.

The study examines the Tor Project's 2019 end-of-life policy that rejects outdated relays, which constitute a notable fraction of consensus weight. A user study of 26 relay operators found they generally view the policy favorably despite limited awareness, though operational practices occasionally exclude newly installed relays. Historical-data-driven simulations show the policy gives adversaries only marginal advantage, with network churn exerting a more pronounced effect on user anonymity. Analysis of four exclusion rounds shows a minority of rejected relays typically account for over 50% of the security provided by all excluded relays, informing EoL policy recommendations.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 08:12 UTC · 3d agoResearch

Toward an Empirical Probabilistic Risk Manifestation Model of Organizational Cybersecurity in SMEs

Empirical study of 22 SME security assessments builds a probabilistic risk model and shows assessments can be cut 24-45% while retaining most critical findings.

Researchers analyzed 281 validated security findings from 22 real-world SME cybersecurity assessments conducted over two years via a pro bono university clinic. They derived an empirical Risk Manifestation Model linking eight organizational security functions to two exposure conditions, five attack mechanisms, and six outcome categories, using probability propagation to identify dominant risk pathways. The dominant pathway runs from asset exposure to credential compromise to unauthorized access, stable under leave-one-organization-out analysis. Retaining six functions reduces assessment burden by 24% while preserving 97% of critical findings; five functions cut burden 45% while preserving 89% of critical findings.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 01:15 UTC · 3d agoResearch

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security LabsSep 11, 00:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

Your Cloud Security Checklist Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does

Intruder's 2026 Cloud Security Index found misconfiguration risk profiles differ sharply across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud across 3,000 organizations.

Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for its 2026 Cloud Security Index. Weak IAM controls and missing logging affected 80-98% of accounts regardless of provider, while exposed services ranged from 76% on AWS to just 8% on Google Cloud. Top issues included S3 buckets without HTTPS enforcement (87% of AWS accounts), Entra ID users without MFA (55% of Azure accounts), and missing OS Login MFA (77% of Google Cloud accounts). Weak IAM prevalence rose with organization size, from 87% at SMEs to 98% at large enterprises, and midmarket organizations took the longest to remediate at 35 days on average.

The Hacker NewsSep 7, 11:45 UTC · 9d agoResearch

Scareware ads keep running on Google's transparency tool, even after they're reported

NYU and Radboud researchers built AdLens, which found 238 scareware and 3,346 false-claim ads in Google's ad archive; reported ads often stayed live.

The AdLens tool, built by NYU and Radboud University researchers, mined Google's Ads Transparency Center and screened 188,000 software ad creatives using similarity search plus a panel of open-source language models, finding 238 scareware ads, 3,346 false-claim ads, and 258 anonymity-avoiding ads with over 100 million impressions in Europe. Reporting ads through Google's standard flow produced inconsistent removals: some ads acknowledged as violations stayed live, and after one takedown tied to the TamperedChef malware domain, 41 other ads pointing to the same domain kept running. The pipeline runs entirely on open-weight models at low cost (a $96 DigitalOcean VM plus $1.57/hour L40S inference) and is designed to extend to Meta and Amazon ad libraries.

Help Net SecuritySep 2, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoResearch