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FST Pay: Deterministic Safety-Gated Architecture for Youth Digital Payments

FST Pay proposes a deterministic safety-gated architecture for teen digital payments, pairing invariant authorization checks with decoupled post-settlement AI explanations.

Researchers propose FST Pay, a formal architecture for adolescent digital payments on rails like UPI that applies six deterministic invariant checks (spending limits, guardian co-sign policies, amount thresholds, merchant category codes, temporal intervals, hardware integrity) to classify transactions as ALLOW, REVIEW, or BLOCK. High-risk transactions trigger an asynchronous guardian co-sign workflow. Generative AI is restricted to post-settlement natural-language insights and holds no mutation privileges over the ledger, avoiding non-determinism on the real-time authorization path.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

NERVE Attacks: Breaking AI-Powered Brain-Computer Interfaces

Researchers characterize NERVE, five attack dimensions against AI-powered brain-computer interfaces, and release the EEGle framework uncovering 17 attack instances.

NERVE is a systematic attack class spanning the BCI stack across five orthogonal dimensions: Neuro-mimetic Forgery, Evasion via Desynchronization, Replay-based Hijacking, Vein Tapping, and Embedded Backdoors. The accompanying EEGle framework enables AI-assisted, extensible BCI security analysis and helped uncover 17 novel neuro-specific attack instances, revealing a stealth-effectiveness spectrum unique to BCI backdoor design. The authors show generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for non-expert attackers and release EEGle to the community.

arXiv cs.CR · 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 Security · 14d agoResearch1

Bridging the First-Hour Gap: Evaluating AI Reliability and Benchmarking Deficiencies in Cyber Incident Response for Law Enforcement

Survey of playbooks, LLMs, RAG, and agentic AI for law-enforcement cyber first responders finds RAG most viable but benchmarks inadequate for legal requirements.

The paper surveys decision-support architectures (playbooks, LLMs, RAG frameworks, agentic AI) for frontline law enforcement during the first hour of a cyber incident, where volatile digital artifacts risk procedural errors and evidence attrition. RAG-based systems are identified as a relatively viable intermediate solution, though prompt sensitivity and confident hallucinations in legal contexts pose major risks. The authors find current cybersecurity benchmarks insufficient for law enforcement safety and legal demands, and argue for a new benchmark focused on naive query robustness and evidence preservation.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Scaling Verification of Cryptographic Software with Aeneas, Rust, and Lean

Microsoft SymCrypt implementations of SHA-3 and ML-KEM verified in Lean via Aeneas-extracted Rust models, with AI agents writing proofs.

The paper develops a methodology for verifying production Rust cryptographic code by using Aeneas to extract pure models into Lean, avoiding low-level pointer and aliasing reasoning. Applied to Microsoft's SymCrypt, it verifies SHA-3 and ML-KEM implementations ported from C to Rust and extends SymCrypt with FrodoKEM, ML-DSA, and HPKE. A 237 KLOC Lean development establishes safety, panic-freedom, and functional correctness of 16.7 KLOC of Rust supporting post-quantum cipher suites on x86-64 and ARM. AI agents autonomously write formal proofs verified by the Lean kernel, and evaluation shows verified Rust meets SymCrypt's performance and portability requirements.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says its NOVA system found 14,090 vulnerabilities in 3,915 open-source projects, mostly non-crashing bugs like access control flaws.

Unit 42's NOVA system analyzed 3,915 open-source projects over two months and reported 14,090 validated vulnerabilities, only 85 of which matched previously documented findings. 92% of findings fell outside fuzzing-friendly categories, clustering instead in access control, path traversal, injection, prototype pollution, and SSRF; language ecosystems showed distinct weakness profiles. Of 5,421 supply-chain findings, 1,280 were flaws in dependencies while 4,141 were downstream exposures, 2,776 validated with working proof-of-concepts. Unit 42 warned that faster discovery combined with an average 55-day patch deployment window has collapsed the patch-to-exploit gap.

Help Net Security · 22d agoResearch1

Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

Schneier on Security highlights a printed vehicle-camouflage pattern tested to defeat Flock surveillance cameras and Axon body cameras.

The post discusses covering cars with printed patterns designed to fool Flock automated license-plate recognition software, with testing reportedly done against Flock and Axon body cameras. Reader comments question effectiveness against other ALPR vendors, Flock's RF MAC-address upgrade, and whether such camouflage might become regulated. The page also contains off-topic comment threads about anti-bot over-blocking and privacy.

Schneier on Security · 10d 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 Security · 15d agoResearch

1Password's AI patching benchmark is misleading

Trail of Bits reanalysis says 1Password's 26% AI clean-fix rate is misleading; 86% of eligible patches blocked exploits.

Trail of Bits critiques 1Password's FLAWED AI patching benchmark, arguing its 26% clean-fix headline mixes trials where agents were instructed to apply wrong fixes (22% of data) with trials that prohibited compiling or testing (36%). Restricting to reasonable conditions, 2,634 of 3,067 patches (86%) blocked the supplied exploit. Trail of Bits also reports 12.5% of 2,265 developer first fixes failed in its own 2024-2026 assessments, and released post-patch-validation and review-walkthrough agent skills.

Lobsters · security · 1d agoResearch1