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CategoryAllVulnerability 1016Malware 638Ransomware 610Industry 464Policy & legal 463Data breach 334Exploit / PoC 332Threat actor 298Phishing & fraud 148Research 112AI safety & security 105AI tools & infra 85AI research 81Tools 73
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Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 2d 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 Labs · 6d agoResearch1

A Graph-Based Approach for Mapping Kernel-Level Telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK

Trace2ATT&CK maps eBPF kernel telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK via provenance graphs and RAG with local open-weights LLMs, validated on 347 Atomic Red Team tests.

Trace2ATT&CK collects kernel-level events via eBPF, correlates attacker commands into a provenance graph, and derives compact graph representations suitable for LLM-based reasoning, mapping behavior to MITRE ATT&CK techniques with ranked candidates and rationales. Mapping uses both pure LLM prompting and retrieval-augmented generation grounded in the ATT&CK knowledge base. It was evaluated on 347 Linux Atomic Red Team tests using locally deployed open-weights LLMs. RAG consistently improved ATT&CK mapping over pure prompting, and provenance graphs substantially outperformed raw telemetry, without compromising data confidentiality.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

AI is changing what Salesforce security needs to govern

WithSecure's Trust Mapping paper proposes a framework for governing trust relationships across Salesforce workflows, AI agents, integrations and connected SaaS systems.

WithSecure's paper 'Navigating Trust in the Modern Salesforce Ecosystem' introduces a Trust Mapping Framework spanning five domains: entities, information, connections, actions and system outcomes. It applies to Salesforce, Agentforce, Headless 360, third-party SaaS and AI-assisted workflows where users, AI agents, APIs and integrations form trust relationships. A Discovery step maps relationships, a Governance step assesses, restricts or retires them, and the paper defines 'trust drift' such as stale credentials, excessive access and unvalidated AI recommendations.

Help Net Security · 6d agoResearch1

AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance

Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.

Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.

Huntress · 9d agoResearch1

Mapping out your unknown: A threat hunter’s guide to GitHub

Datadog Security Labs publishes a threat-hunting guide with audit-log queries to detect GitHub token theft, device code phishing, and source code exfiltration.

Datadog's threat-hunting guide covers GitHub audit log queries for detecting compromised accounts, stolen personal access tokens, and malicious OAuth app authorizations. Attackers typically obtain credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, leaked secrets, or device code phishing, then map private repositories, exfiltrate source code, and pivot into connected cloud and CI/CD environments. The guide maps detections to MITRE techniques like T1078 and T1528 and documents GitHub logging quirks affecting attribution, token metadata, and visibility fields.

Datadog Security Labs · 1d agoResearch in the wild1

Lightweight Zero Trust via Automotive SDN

Researchers map automotive SDN with MACsec/MKA and CORECONF/YANG to NIST SP 800-207, satisfying five of seven Zero Trust tenets without added infrastructure.

Zonal in-vehicle networks ship Ethernet, MACsec, and TSN but treat the network itself as trusted, with no standardized runtime way to revoke access, rotate keys, or contain a compromised ECU. The paper first analyzes what Open Alliance TC17 v1.0 MACsec/MKA with pre-shared CAKs already provides against the seven NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust tenets. It then adds CORECONF/YANG management per Open Alliance TC19, mapping the SDN Controller and Agents one-to-one onto NIST's PE, PA, and PEP, and instantiates a YANG-based network-access-control flow and key-management scheme. The result fully covers five of the seven tenets and partially covers two, without any ZTA-specific infrastructure.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

How to correlate Kubernetes audit logs with container runtime data

Elastic Security Labs shows how to join Kubernetes audit logs with Defend for Containers runtime data to investigate service account abuse and container escapes.

Elastic Security Labs demonstrates correlating Kubernetes audit logs with Defend for Containers (D4C) runtime telemetry in Elastic. In an Amazon EKS lab, a compromised workload service account performed discovery, read secrets, minted a token, created a privileged pod, and execed into it to attempt a container escape via nsenter and chroot. The escape wrappers appeared only in the decoded Kubernetes audit requestURI, not in runtime process events. The post covers join fields, prebuilt EQL sequence rules, and continues the control-plane correlation thread from the TeamPCP container attack scenario and the Hugging Face intrusion write-up.

Elastic Security Labs · 13d agoResearch1

Linux Detection Engineering - Fileless Execution

Elastic Security Labs reproduces five Linux fileless execution patterns, including memfd_create staging and in-memory kernel module loads, and maps each to Elastic Defend rules.

Elastic Security Labs reproduced five Linux fileless execution patterns using its FENIX tooling: memfd_create staging, interpreter one-liners, deleted binaries, and in-memory kernel module loads. Each pattern is mapped to the Elastic Defend detection rules that catch it. The post is part of the team's ongoing Linux detection engineering series.

Elastic Security Labs · 15d agoResearch

The AI Malware Maturity Gap

Recorded Future introduces AIM3, a five-level maturity model for AI malware, showing current attacker AI use is mostly AI-assisted rather than autonomous.

Recorded Future proposes AIM3, a five-level model defining AI malware from LLM-translated to LLM-embedded, spanning experimentation to fully autonomous agentic campaigns. Public examples remain early-stage: PROMPTFLUX uses Google Gemini to rewrite its VBScript dropper (Level 1), while Lamehug/PROMPTSTEAL, attributed to APT28, invokes the HuggingFace API to generate reconnaissance commands (Level 3). The authors argue most current AI malware augments existing tradecraft rather than enabling one-click autonomous attacks.

Recorded Future · 22d agoResearch

Introducing Unit 42’s Attribution Framework

Unit 42 releases its Attribution Framework, a systematic method using Diamond Model and Admiralty scores to attribute activity clusters to named threat actors.

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 introduced a structured framework for threat actor attribution built on the Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis and Admiralty reliability/credibility scoring. The framework tracks activity at three levels: activity clusters (named CL-STA, CL-CRI, CL-UNK, or CL-MIX), temporary threat groups, and named threat actors using the constellation naming schema. Analysts score evidence across TTPs, tooling, malware code, OPSEC, infrastructure, timelines, and victimology to decide when to merge or elevate clusters, avoiding premature group naming.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

338 Million Attack Simulations Reveal The State Of Enterprise Defense

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, from 338 million attack simulations, finds defenses strong at the perimeter but blocking only 37% of post-compromise actions.

Picus Labs' fourth annual Blue Report analyzed over 338 million attack simulations from production environments in H1 2026. Average prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, but only 37% of attacker actions were blocked after compromise, with reconnaissance and credential theft largely missed. IOC-based malware download prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz credential dumping from LSASS memory was blocked 94% of the time versus 17% from other memory locations and 3% from registry.

Help Net Security · Aug 12, 2026Research

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

Analysis of Vercel and Composio breaches shows stolen OAuth tokens, not phishing email, now open Google Workspace attacks — a path authorized AI agents follow.

The author analyzes the Vercel and Composio breaches as the same OAuth-first attack chain run twice: a stolen OAuth token, obtained via a compromised supplier, becomes the entry point rather than email. These tokens survive password resets, are hard to observe, and let attackers read Gmail and Drive data, take over accounts, and pivot laterally using stored credentials and password-reset magic links. The piece warns that authorized AI agents with overbroad OAuth grants can unintentionally traverse the same path — accessing inboxes, reading sensitive content, and exfiltrating data downstream — without any malicious actor or compromised credential.

Help Net Security · 1d agoResearch in the wild

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Apple introduces Reference Image, hardware-backed verifiable photography on iPhone 18 Pro using sensor signing and Private Cloud Compute to counter AI-generated fakes.

Apple announced Reference Image, an opt-in camera mode debuting on the main sensor of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that produces securely timestamped, verifiable photographs. The design splits into two phases: a secure digital negative created by cryptographically signing pixel data at the sensor immediately after capture (preventing injection or tampering), then developing that negative into a reference image. Private Cloud Compute handles processing without exposing image contents to anyone, including Apple, and fraudulent reference images can be revoked without revealing the photographer's identity. Apple positions the system as stronger than C2PA-based approaches, which sign metadata after capture, are vulnerable to editing-chain compromise, and can tie images to a device or individual.

Hacker News · security · 1d agoResearchHN 25↑ · 18 comments

Evaluating the NIST Bugs Framework Against CWE as a Successor for Automated Vulnerability Classification

NIST Bugs Framework evaluation shows it is more structured and automation-friendly than CWE for automated vulnerability classification, with gaps in attribute guidance.

The paper evaluates NIST SP 800-231's Bugs Framework (BF) against CWE as a target for automated CVE classification using a systematically screened corpus of CVE-to-CWE research. An inter-rater study with 2 subject-matter experts mapping 13 CVEs showed strong agreement on BF's cause and operation axes but only fair agreement on the attribute axis. Automated classification was tested across two LLM deployments under different budgets, and findings support BF as more structured and automation-friendly than CWE, though gaps include under-specified attribute guidance and missing fix commits for closed-source software.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

The Security Feature Location Problem

Researchers formalize security feature location, mapping code regions to security features like authentication and encryption to audit implementations.

The paper introduces security feature location: the task of relating code locations to implemented security features such as authentication and encryption. It argues the task enables developers to understand security implementations and assess whether intended security properties are actually enforced in software systems.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

The Year in Web Threats: Web Skimmers Take Advantage of Cloud Hosting and More

Unit 42 analyzed 2.24 million web threat incidents, finding web skimmers increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure to steal payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed 2,241,354 web threat incidents and 831,550 unique URLs detected via Advanced URL Filtering between October 2020 and September 2021. Threat activity peaked from October 2020 to January 2021, coinciding with the holiday shopping season, with most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Russia, and Germany. Web skimmers ranked third among the top five threat classes and showed the most code diversity, making detection harder. Researchers observed more web skimmer families being hosted on cloud platforms to steal payment data and PII.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Trends in Web Threats: Attackers Were More Active During Holiday Season

Unit 42 tracked 533,000 malicious landing URL incidents from October-December 2021, showing web threats peaked during the holiday shopping season.

Unit 42 detected 533,452 malicious landing URL incidents (120,753 unique) and 2,906,875 malicious host URL incidents (165,255 unique) from October through December 2021. Threat activity peaked in November, likely tied to Black Friday in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Most malicious domains appeared to originate in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany. Personal sites, blogs, business sites, and shopping sites were the most common apparently benign entry points for attacks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud

Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research1

Enterprise Defenses Recovered at the Edge and Collapsed Inside

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026 finds perimeter prevention at 69% but post-compromise prevention just 37%, with reconnaissance blocked only 10% of the time.

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, based on 434,000+ simulated attacks across client production environments in H1 2026, found perimeter prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69% while the Post-Compromise Prevention Rate was only 37%. Quiet techniques fared worst: reconnaissance was blocked 10% of the time, registry-based credential access less than 1%, and the alert score stayed at 14% despite logging at a four-year high of 58%. IOC-based prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz's LSASS path was blocked about 94% while alternative credential-read paths went nearly undetected.

The Hacker News · Aug 12, 2026Research

s-MDM: Generative Virtualization of Multi-Device Hardware Variations for Portable DL-SCA

Researchers present s-MDM, a generative framework synthesizing virtual device profiles to improve cross-device portability of deep learning side-channel analysis.

The poster introduces the Synthetic Multiple Device Model (s-MDM), a zero-target-trace generative framework addressing performance degradation of deep learning side-channel analysis on unseen hardware. It combines a structured cVAE generator, Walsh-Hadamard leakage anchors, continuous style modulation, and decoupled leakage-style-domain critics to synthesize virtual source-device profiles offline. Benchmarked on 32-bit AES_PTv2 traces, s-MDM achieves consistently low key rank on layout- and acquisition-shifted Pinata targets where physical baselines are unstable.

arXiv cs.CR · 16h agoResearch

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.CR · 22h agoResearch

Most Firms Unable to Recover Quickly from Ransomware

Fenix24's first State of Recoverability report finds only 0.5% of 800+ ransomware clients neared 24-48 hour recovery targets, with identity failures central.

Drawing on 500+ ransomware recoveries, Fenix24 found only four of 800+ clients (0.5%) came close to their own 24-48 hour recovery targets, and none reached full operations for weeks. 99.2% lacked a documented identity recovery plan, Active Directory typically fell first, and 94% tied backup systems to the compromised directory. In 38% of engagements backups survived but could not carry recovery; storage ran short in 82% of cases and 95% lacked meaningful MFA on critical infrastructure consoles.

Infosecurity Magazine · 1d agoResearch

What Zero-Day Response Should Be in the Post-Mythos Era

Picus Security outlines a zero-day response playbook where defenders simulate exploit technique chains before public PoCs exist.

The article uses PaperCut NG/MF's August incident — exploitation in the wild before any patch, with the first emergency fix bypassed the same day and a third landing September 1 — as the template for AI-accelerated vulnerability response. It walks through a hypothetical CVE-2026-1001 (explicitly made up) to argue defenders should map CVEs to ATT&CK technique chains and simulate them against NGFW, WAF, EDR, endpoint hardening, and SIEM controls within minutes of disclosure. It notes disclosure-to-exploitation time has fallen from 21.5 days to hours.

BleepingComputer · 1d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2026-1001

From Hypervisor to Container: Cloud Security Vulnerabilities, Defense Mechanisms, and Open Challenges

Survey of 120+ cloud security papers (2008-2025) reviews hypervisor and container isolation attacks, scoring defenses with the ADPO framework and CIA impact scale.

This survey reviews over 120 security publications from 2008 to 2025 on breaches of cloud isolation boundaries via virtual machines and containers. Threats examined include VM escape, VM hopping, CPU cache side-channels, container breakouts, vulnerable container images, and DDoS attacks. The authors introduce ADPO, a 0-3 scoring framework rating defenses on accuracy, deployment ease, performance impact, and operational overhead, plus a 1-5 CIA severity mapping for attack impact.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

A Cyber Range Evaluation of Autonomous Network Incident Response Agents

Cyber range evaluation shows reinforcement learning incident response agents defend emulated networks more efficiently than heuristic policies, depending heavily on adversary behavior.

The paper evaluates agents for automated network intrusion response in a cyber range designed for human operator training, featuring variable topology, red-team emulation, and simulated users. Alerts are generated by a SIEM platform and mapped to a data modeling language used by the agents, with reinforcement learning policies optimized to minimize combined defense and availability costs using a cyber attack simulator. Reinforcement learning agents defended the system more efficiently than heuristic policies, with performance highly dependent on the adversary policy and simulated user behavior.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Event-Native Symbolic-Temporal Spike Encoding Framework for Heterogeneous Cyber Streams

An event-native spike encoding framework lets recurrent spiking neural networks run intrusion detection directly on heterogeneous packet and CAN bus streams.

The paper maps heterogeneous cyber events—categorical identifiers, local frequency context, and inter-event timing—directly into sparse spike-compatible inputs for spiking neural networks. This avoids flow aggregation and fixed windows that add buffering latency and obscure temporal structure in traditional IDS pipelines. Compact recurrent SNNs under edge-oriented neuromorphic hardware constraints achieve a hybrid anomaly metric of 0.987 on packet-level Network IDS and 0.980 on message-level CAN IDS.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · security · 5d agoResearch

Subgroup Packing for Batched PASTA Transciphering

Interleaved subgroup packing cuts PASTA homomorphic transciphering server cost by a median 1.60x at the expense of remaining noise capacity.

The paper studies how record word layout affects the cost of PASTA transciphering, where a server converts symmetrically encrypted records into homomorphic ciphertexts. A subgroup layout interleaves records so cyclic shifts preserve positions, reducing required displacements from 255 to 128 versus contiguous packing. In HElib across twelve paired corpora under six homomorphic keys, the median direct-to-subgroup server cost ratio is 1.60 including fresh generation, conversion, and two queries, but with less remaining noise capacity.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

An Open-Source End-to-End FHE Implementation for Privacy-Preserving Llama 3 8B Inference

Odin runs Llama-3-8B fully homomorphic encrypted inference on a single H100 in 366 seconds, a 4.51x speedup over THOR.

Odin is an open-source end-to-end GPU CKKS implementation for privacy-preserving Llama-3-8B inference that co-designs ciphertext packing with model execution. A feature-major cross-layer layout unifies residual connections and layer interfaces, while transient intra-operator layouts serve linear projections and attention, avoiding intermediate repacking of QK^T softmax outputs. Minimax polynomial approximation with input-range control reduces polynomial degree and multiplicative depth for nonlinear ops. With 128-token input, Odin evaluates all 32 Transformer layers on one NVIDIA H100 80 GB in 366.4 s using 58.9 GiB peak memory, versus 1651.9 s for the THOR baseline, a 4.51x speedup.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Function Name Is All You Need to Detect Blockchain Application Attacks

TxLucent detects blockchain dApp attacks from transaction function-name sequences using a transformer, achieving 1.56% false negatives without source code.

Researchers propose TxLucent, which maps transaction call traces to function name sequences and uses a transformer to detect blockchain application attacks without source code or handcrafted rules. Evaluated on 424 real-world incidents with 14,611 attack transactions, it achieves a 1.56% false negative rate and an estimated 0.0017% false positive rate across over 500 million Ethereum transactions. Average analysis time of 24.90 milliseconds supports real-time detection on popular blockchains.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

Atlas: Efficient Verifiable Semantic Search

Atlas delivers zero-knowledge proofs for HNSW semantic search, verifying RAG retrieval in under a second on SIFT1M and 2.0 seconds at 100M vectors.

Atlas lets a search provider prove that a query was answered correctly against a committed HNSW index without revealing the index, addressing provider deviations like truncation or bias. It combines offline preprocessing, a fixed-size-state restructuring of HNSW with a correctness proof, and timestep-tagged batching of per-step arguments. The system proves queries in under a second on SIFT1M and 2.0 seconds at 100 million vectors while preserving plaintext HNSW recall, and proven retrieval maintains end-to-end RAG answer quality at lower cost than prior verifiable retrieval systems.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch3

PHAT: PHotonic Accelerator for TFHE

PHAT photonic accelerator using optically addressed phase-change memory speeds TFHE bootstrapping FFTs 2.14x-5.10x over the prior ASIC accelerator.

Researchers propose PHAT, an electro-photonic accelerator for TFHE fully homomorphic encryption built on optically addressed phase-change memory (OPCM) processing-in-memory. The architecture adds OPCM-based FFT units, a twiddle-stationary dataflow, and a scheduling mechanism to maximize FFT utilization for TFHE bootstrapping. It achieves 2.14x-5.10x speedups across four real-world TFHE workloads versus the state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator, improving feasibility of privacy-preserving computation in the cloud.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

CHERI-D Reincarnate: efficient multicore CHERI temporal memory safety through allocation reincarnation (draft version)

CHERI-D Reincarnate adds allocation reincarnation to CHERI, quarantining generation IDs instead of memory to cut temporal memory-safety overheads on multicore systems.

The proposal extends CHERI-D temporal memory safety by quarantining exhausted generation IDs rather than memory slots, allowing freed memory immediate reuse through allocation reincarnation. It adds coherent ID caching and multicore support connecting physical coherence events to the virtually addressed ObjID buffer. The design was implemented as a hardware-software co-design across CHERI-Toooba FPGA softcore, QEMU, LLVM/Clang, and CheriBSD. Across evaluated workloads it substantially reduces memory-sweep frequency and quarantine overhead with low performance and hardware cost.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Heterogeneous Cross-Chain Transaction Tracing for Solana Bridges via Candidate-Set Selective Decision

SolTracer traces cross-chain transactions onto Solana bridges, improving open-world association F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline for illicit-fund tracing.

The paper formalizes four Solana-bound cross-chain transaction modes and proposes SolTracer, which maps heterogeneous execution semantics into a unified event space and uses candidate-set selective decision-making with abstention when valid targets are absent. In the challenging open-world setting with a 50% TA ratio, SolTracer improves F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline. An empirical study of real-world transfers examines count-value divergence across bridge mechanisms, cross-asset shifts, and decoupling between on-chain settlement and explorer visibility.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning

Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.

CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.

CSO Online · 6d agoResearch

CertiFlash: A Formal Verification Framework for Flash Translation Layers in Computational Solid State Drives

CertiFlash provides machine-checked formal verification of SSD flash translation layers, proving isolation, integrity, and ownership invariants to prevent tenant data leaks.

CertiFlash is an open-source formal verification framework for Flash Translation Layers (FTL) in computational SSDs, mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant. It shows that a faulty FTL can corrupt device state at five surfaces (e.g., leaking data between tenants or dropping integrity tags), demonstrated on a DaisyPlus OpenSSD. Designers prove once that every operation of a general FTL model preserves a global invariant covering mapping, isolation, integrity, ownership, and allocation; new designs need only discharge five hypotheses. Across four case studies, added effort was 27-3,231 lines against a 16,489-line framework.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)

Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.

Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

Cloudflare Blog · 8d agoResearch

Navigating the Latent Manifold: Proactive Concept Drift Adaptation for Resilient NIDS

Researchers propose DriftXpert, a concept-drift-adaptive network intrusion detection system validated on enterprise networks, addressing degraded AI-based NIDS performance in dynamic traffic.

AI-based network intrusion detection systems assume static data distributions and degrade under concept drift, raising false positives in dynamic environments. DriftXpert uses a two-stage offline framework: an unsupervised latent-manifold anomaly metric to detect traffic drift, and representation consistency alignment with cross-epoch neuron weight aggregation and selective freezing to transfer knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. Experiments on public datasets and a real enterprise network show effective adaptation to drifted data while retaining known-attack detection.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch