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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 · 4d agoResearch

Windows Malware Detector as a Compound AI System: Trade-Offs in Accuracy, Efficiency, and Adversarial Robustness

Researchers model industrial Windows malware detection as a Compound AI System, quantifying trade-offs between detection accuracy, efficiency, and adversarial robustness under tiered attacker knowledge.

Industrial Windows malware detectors combine rule-based mechanisms with ML-based static and dynamic analyses, but their architectures are rarely publicly disclosed. The authors propose a methodology balancing detection performance, computational cost, and robustness, plus system-level threat models capturing whole-pipeline evasion rather than isolated components. Experiments on real-world data show training time reductions with marginal detection loss, while more knowledgeable attackers craft increasingly effective adversarial examples. The paper derives deployment guidelines from the observed efficiency-robustness trade-off.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

Guppy: Efficient Light Clients via Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Guppy lets blockchain light clients verify full state via recursive zero-knowledge proofs without validators maintaining state commitments, processing thousands of updates per second.

Guppy is a light-client protocol in which validators commit only to state updates while an off-chain, untrusted service secured by recursive zero-knowledge proofs maintains a verifiable Merkle tree over the full state. A hash-chain commitment moves validator signature verification out of the proving circuit, and a parallel recursive proving pipeline keeps latency growth logarithmic with throughput. A Plonky2-based implementation maintains a tree of size 2^30 while processing thousands of updates per second, adding only 2-4 seconds of latency without increasing block-construction complexity.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch