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26 stories in the last 7d

The Self-Expanding Stolen Inference Supply Chain: An AI Agent Harvesting and Re-Serving LLM Access, (Fri, Sep 11th)

An autonomous coding agent harvested LLM API access from poorly secured gateways and aggregated stolen inference capacity behind a self-hosted gateway

A SANS researcher observed a semi-autonomous coding agent finding weakly secured LLM resale gateways via FOFA queries, creating trial accounts with temporary emails and CAPTCHA solving, and exploiting weak authorization such as client-supplied group_id fields. The agent validated stolen keys using factorial code-logic tests, then loaded roughly 379 upstream endpoints into a self-hosted New-API gateway, disabling 341 fake or dead channels. Five model names including claude-opus-5 and gpt-5.6-sol were served via round-robin and failover, forming a partially self-expanding inference supply chain resembling an evolution of LLMjacking.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild

SpliTEE: Improving LLM Inference on Trusted Hardware with Differentially Private GPU Outsourcing

SpliTEE splits LLM inference between Intel TDX trusted execution and untrusted GPUs, using differential privacy instead of encryption to protect intermediate representations.

SpliTEE extends split inference to LLMs, running inference partly inside an Intel TDX TEE while masking intermediate inputs sent to untrusted GPUs with differential privacy rather than encryption. The authors show a prompt-reconstruction attack recovers nearly 80% of prompts from unmasked intermediate representations, motivating the masking. A global sensitivity analysis bounds the required DP noise scale, avoiding quantization and keeping models in floating point. The implementation is nearly twice as fast as full CPU-based TDX inference and 5-15 seconds faster than encryption-based Slalom with higher accuracy, evaluated on Llama-3.2-3B and Qwen3-4B.

arXiv cs.CR · 3d agoResearch

Shuffling is Not Enough: Breaking Permutation-Based Model Confidentiality in Hybrid FHE Inference

Attack breaks permutation-based model confidentiality in hybrid FHE inference, recovering all ResNet-20 linear layers exactly with d+1 queries per layer.

The paper shows output-permutation plus noise fails to protect model confidentiality in hybrid FHE inference: d+1 admissible queries recover an exact permutation-invariant summary of a d-input linear layer, and shuffle-model DP amplification premises cannot hold under correctness-bounded noise. The authors recovered all linear layers of a Safhire-style ResNet-20 end-to-end from TFHE transcripts with zero error, using 5,712 total queries. Exact per-layer recovery was also confirmed on pretrained ImageNet-scale CNNs and ViT-B/16. Leaked layer spectra enable model fingerprinting, lineage attribution, and improved logit-based extraction, while suppressing them destroys inference utility.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

GraphProfiler: Source-Linked Sensitive Attribute Inference via Personal Knowledge Graphs

GraphProfiler links LLM attribute inferences to source posts via personal knowledge graphs, enabling targeted redaction of privacy-leaking content.

GraphProfiler represents a user's post history as a source-linked personal knowledge graph where nodes and edges trace back to originating posts, making LLM-based attribute inference auditable. It reaches 86.7% attack success rate on the eight-attribute SynthPAI benchmark and 84.6% on PANDORA, within two points of strong text-only baselines, while citing supporting evidence for over 98% of predictions. Ablation experiments show removing cited posts reduces attack success substantially more than removing random posts, supporting targeted privacy mitigation.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch2

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

OptiPrime: Optimizing Private Inference through Protocol-Hardware Co-design

OptiPrime co-designs HE-MPC protocols with hardware acceleration to remove network communication bottlenecks in private DNN inference, beating Cheetah by up to 5.7x.

OptiPrime is a protocol-hardware co-optimization framework for private deep neural network inference based on hybrid homomorphic encryption (HE) and multi-party computation (MPC). It introduces a novel HE protocol for convolutions that reduces the number of transmitted output ciphertexts, addressing the network bottleneck that limits gains from commercial HE accelerators. A lightweight compression system reduces weight plaintext memory traffic by 10x, while a specialized dataflow maximizes on-chip reuse of intermediate ciphertexts. Experiments show up to 5.7x speedup over the Cheetah baseline on CPUs and 4.2x with an accelerator.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Cross-Domain Inference for Human Localization: Applying Wi-Fi RSSI Data to CSI-Trained Models

Researchers show CSI-trained Wi-Fi models can localize people from RSSI data at ~80% confidence, enabling privacy attacks from ordinary IoT devices.

The paper investigates cross-domain inference, feeding RSSI data into an existing CSI-based Wi-Fi pose prediction model. RSSI is accessible on IoT devices without elevated OS permissions or specialized drivers, unlike CSI. Using an RSSI dataset synchronized with video ground truth, the model predicted human locations with approximately 80% confidence when movement was present. The results imply a wide range of commodity IoT devices could be used for privacy invasion in Wi-Fi-dense environments.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Microsoft Offers Up to $30,000 for Critical AI Flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Microsoft expands AI bug bounty to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paying up to $30,000 for critical inference manipulation flaws.

Microsoft's bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 for critical 'Inference Manipulation' or 'Inferential Information Disclosure' bugs in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, AI Builder, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. Payouts scale by report quality ($30,000/$20,000/$12,000 for critical) with important-severity AI flaws earning $6,000-$20,000, plus 20% multipliers for Dataverse privilege escalation and Plugin Sandbox escapes. Prompt injection affecting only the attacker, hallucinated execution, and system-prompt disclosure are excluded from scope.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoIndustry

Don't Send What You Don't Need: Question-Guided Token Pruning as a Privacy Defense for Vision-Language Models

QPriv-VL prunes privacy-sensitive visual tokens in federated/split VQA, cutting membership-inference success on VQA-RAD from 0.99 to 0.76-0.79 using ~40% of tokens.

The paper proposes QPriv-VL, a question-guided token-pruning framework for federated, split, and U-shaped split learning that suppresses privacy-sensitive visual patches before transmission. Its Dynamic Threshold Predictor combines cross-modal question relevance with frozen DINOv2-derived sensitivity to compute a per-sample pruning ratio and retention mask in one forward pass, without sensitivity labels. Evaluated on GQA, OK-VQA, VQAv2, SLAKE, VQA-RAD, and PathVQA against FSHA, FORA, iDLG, and attribute-inference membership inference attacks, it matches or beats fixed-ratio pruning. On VQA-RAD it reduces membership-inference success from 0.99 to 0.76-0.79 while preserving competitive accuracy with about 40% of the original token budget.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

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 · 3d agoResearch

We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub in 25 minutes

Strix autonomous hacking agent extracted a working GitHub token with repo admin rights from Baseten's public Harbor image; Baseten rotated it next day.

Strix, an autonomous hacking agent, scanned *.baseten.co without credentials and found a public Harbor container registry project anonymously exposing the baseten/baseten-app image. A GitHub personal access token for basetenbot, embedded in Docker build history since March 2023, still worked in July 2026 and granted admin/push rights to basetenlabs/baseten, flux-cd, and homebrew-tap plus read/write on private customer repos. Baseten, valued at $13 billion, confirmed the issue as critical and rotated the token within a day.

Hardware Fingerprinting FTQC via Quantum Decoder Timing

Quantum decoder timing on IBM Heron processors forms a side channel enabling device fingerprinting with 89% accuracy and workload inference.

The work demonstrates that wall-clock syndrome-decoding times on fault-tolerant quantum computers constitute a novel hardware side channel. Using per-shot decoder timings from three IBM Heron processors collected over 68 days, a passive observer can reconstruct detector-firing distributions, estimate logical error rate, infer code distance, and fingerprint the specific device with up to 89% accuracy versus 33% for random guessing. Noisy simulation based on Google's 105-qubit Willow processor distinguishes nine surface-code patches at 81% accuracy, showing the channel persists across vendors and code families.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Predicting Privacy Leakage from Weight Spectral Density

Study shows WeightWatcher spectral metrics like stable rank correlate with membership inference vulnerability, enabling cheaper ML privacy auditing.

The paper tests whether spectral metrics from the heavy-tailed self-regularisation framework can proxy membership inference attack (MIA) vulnerability without training expensive shadow models. On image and tabular classification tasks, stable rank correlates positively with overall MIA success, while Log alpha-Norm correlates negatively at the low false-positive regime. These correlations are stronger than those obtained from the generalisation gap, suggesting weight spectra capture leakage information overfitting measures miss. The authors propose spectral analysis as a scalable direction for privacy auditing.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Ransomware incidents in Japan in the first half of 2026: Investigation of The Gentlemen’s infrastructure and evidence of Qilin's AI use

Cisco Talos reports 90 ransomware incidents hit Japanese organizations in H1 2026, led by The Gentlemen, with Qilin using AI for efficiency.

Cisco Talos observed 90 ransomware incidents against Japanese organizations from January to July 2026, up about 4.7% year over year, with manufacturing accounting for 34% of victims. The Gentlemen was the most active group with 14 incidents; its leak-site listings grew from 48 in January to 105 in July. Qilin and SafePay followed with seven incidents each, and Talos notes Qilin is leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency.

Cisco Talosupdated · 41m agofirst · 3h agoRansomware in the wild 2 sources

Microsoft Offers $60,000 Bounty for Critical Cross-Tenant Vulnerabilities

Microsoft expands Dynamics 365 and Power Platform bug bounty, paying up to $60,000 for critical cross-tenant vulnerabilities.

Microsoft expanded its bounty incentives for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, with qualifying rewards from $1,250 to $60,000. Critical cross-tenant vulnerabilities receive a 100% award multiplier and important ones 50%, while critical AI inference manipulation or inferential disclosure can earn up to $30,000. Scope covers Dynamics 365 apps, Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Power Pages, Dataverse, and selected on-premises products. Reports must be rated Critical or Important and submitted via the MSRC Researcher Portal.

GBHackers · 2d agoIndustry1

New Android Malware Steals Banking PINs and Reinstalls Itself After Users Delete It

Zimperium identified RatHat, an Android banking trojan capturing PINs via overlays and abusing Wireless Debugging to reinstall itself after removal.

Zimperium zLabs identified RatHat, an Android banking trojan delivered via smishing, malvertising, and third-party forums, linked to actors apparently operating in China. After abusing Accessibility permissions to enable Wireless Debugging and pair with local ADB for shell access, it installs a Go-based local agent and a Fast Reverse Proxy client in system directories. It uses fake overlays to steal banking, crypto, and payment credentials, intercepts SMS one-time codes, sends screen maps to a generative AI assistant for adaptive automation, and reinstalls itself via /data/local/tmp/app.apk after uninstall.

Cyber Security News · 4h agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Analog Pin Directionality as an Exfiltration Attack Surface in Mixed-Signal ICs

Researchers demonstrate exfiltration through nominally input-only analog pins in mixed-signal ICs, recovering data at 10 kbps on a 55nm PPG front-end.

The paper identifies a directionality-based attack class in analog/mixed-signal (AMS) ICs where data-dependent circuit-offset modulation converts a nominally input-only pin into an outbound information channel. Three host conditions enable the attack: a closed-loop amplifier, an exposed amplifier input, and sufficiently high impedance at that pin. Silicon validation on a photoplethysmography analog front-end in 55nm CMOS showed exfiltration at up to 10 kbps with error-free PRBS recovery, under 0.001% area overhead, and only 0.03 dB SNR reduction.

arXiv cs.CR · 19h agoResearch

CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard

Horizon3.ai releases a scorecard for evaluating CTEM technologies on demonstrated exploitability and remediation evidence.

Horizon3.ai published a downloadable CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard for assessing security technologies across the six-stage Continuous Threat Exposure Management operating model, from discovering exposure through verifying risk removal. The scorecard uses a 0-3 scale based on repeatable evidence demonstrated in the evaluator's environment rather than stated feature claims, with emphasis on validating exploitability and verifying remediation. It is vendor marketing material aimed at security leaders and evaluation teams.

Horizon3.ai · 20h agoIndustry 2 sources

Normal Alignment: Improved Cryptanalytic Sign Recovery on Hard-Label Networks

Researchers propose Normal Alignment, improving cryptanalytic sign recovery for hard-label neural networks and enabling polynomial-time full model extraction.

The paper improves on Carlini et al.'s EUROCRYPT 2025 cryptanalytic extraction of hard-label (S1) DNNs, whose Future Toggle sign-recovery method offered only marginal advantage over random guessing and triggered exponential-time enumeration on errors. Normal Alignment infers neuron signs via expected length differences between projected normals of adjacent decision facets at dual points, delivering higher voting accuracy and low-confidence errors. Combined with the SOE extension, it achieves exact polynomial-time full sign recovery: CIFAR-10 (192-64x8-10) and MNIST (64-96x3-32-10) models are fully recovered where the prior method required 2^52 or 2^82 sign guesses.

arXiv cs.CR · 22h agoResearch

Detecting Logic Vulnerabilities Across the Contract and Device Layers of Blockchain-Enabled IoT With Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Graph Attention

MA-HGAT framework detects logic vulnerabilities across smart contract and IoT device firmware layers using multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention.

Researchers extend MA-HGAT into a cross-layer multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention framework that models smart contracts, firmware artifacts, device fleets, and transaction streams for blockchain-enabled IoT security. A four-role, nine-relation schema supports graph-, link-, and node-level detection tasks, while a gateway-cloud partition enables lightweight edge inference on resource-constrained devices.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Public PoC Released for Apache Superset SQL Injection Vulnerability

A public Python PoC exploit is available for CVE-2026-23980, an authenticated error-based SQL injection in Apache Superset versions before 6.0.0.

CVE-2026-23980 is a SQL injection flaw (CWE-89) in Apache Superset affecting all releases before 6.0.0, exploitable via the sqlExpression and where parameters by authenticated users with read-level access. A public repository containing a Python exploit.py proof-of-concept has been released, reducing attacker effort against exposed instances. Apache disclosed the issue on February 24, 2026 and fixed it in Superset 6.0.0. Defenders should upgrade and monitor logs for malformed queries, database errors, and unusual activity from low-privilege accounts.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoExploit / PoC 2 sourcesCVE-2026-239801

ROSETTA: Efficient and Accurate Privacy-Preserving LLM Decoding via Hybrid CKKS/TFHE Evaluation

ROSETTA is a hybrid CKKS/TFHE homomorphic encryption framework for privacy-preserving LLM decoding, achieving up to 4.8x Softmax and 2.1x end-to-end speedups.

The paper proposes ROSETTA, a hybrid CKKS/TFHE fully homomorphic encryption framework for private inference on generative LLMs, targeting the nonlinear operations that dominate autoregressive decoding cost. It introduces an adaptive segmented lookup-table protocol based on TFHE and a scheme-aware operator-selection framework that assigns each nonlinear operator to CKKS or TFHE to minimize latency. Experiments show up to 4.8x Softmax speedup and 1.5-2.1x end-to-end decoding speedup over the state-of-the-art CacheMir framework.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Automating Attack Graph Construction for Agentic Pentesting. Towards Neuro-Symbolic Vulnerability Hunting

Semi-automated pipeline converts Trivy, Semgrep, Nmap output into MulVAL attack graphs for agentic pentesting, 53.7% mean vulnerability coverage in CyBench.

The paper presents a semi-automated pipeline that parses Trivy, Semgrep, and Nmap findings into MulVAL predicates and uses an LLM-assisted process to build domain-specific Datalog rules linking scanner evidence to attack techniques. MulVAL/XSB then performs symbolic inference to generate structured, auditable attack paths for agentic pentesting. Evaluated on 54 web CTF tasks from CyBench, every task produced at least one goal-reaching graph with 53.7% mean ground-truth vulnerability coverage, 51.9% full coverage, and an 83.9% noise-path rate. Median end-to-end runtime was 24.9 seconds, making the pipeline runtime-practical for agentic workflows.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 3d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read

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

Differentially Private EEG Feature Anonymization: A Privacy-Utility Case Study in Clinical Neurophysiology

Case study applies Gaussian and Laplace differential privacy to clinical EEG features, quantifying privacy-utility trade-offs across three deployment scenarios.

Researchers evaluate subject-level differential privacy for EEG-derived feature representations using Gaussian and Laplace perturbations across client-side, centralized server-side, and decentralized local training scenarios. Utility is assessed with statistical measures and a downstream machine-learning check on clinical neurophysiology data. Results show DP can be integrated into EEG workflows, but mechanism choice, privacy parameters, and sensitivity calibration strongly influence data utility, particularly on small and imbalanced clinical datasets. The study highlights the privacy-utility trade-off in protecting biomedical signals against re-identification and inference risks.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch