ZeroHour

Search: “binary-recompilation”

28 stories in the last 7d

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

Re: Retrospective by 'gpg.fail' authors

oss-security follow-up to a gpg.fail authors' retrospective argues that GnuPG's unmaintained, forgotten code is a security liability and should be deleted.

On the oss-security mailing list, Soatok Dreamseeker responds to a retrospective published by the gpg.fail authors, asking why unmaintained code is retained and stating that forgotten, unmaintained code is a liability and effectively unmaintained by definition. The visible reply addresses Werner Koch and concerns GnuPG code maintenance. No specific CVE, flaw, or exploitation is described in this snippet.

No Bit Left Behind: Using Brute-Force Lifting to Achieve Fully Static Binary Recompilation

Prototype binary lifter brute-force lifts every byte offset of x86-64 binaries to LLVM IR, enabling fully static cross-ISA recompilation without runtime support.

The paper presents a fully static, whole-program binary lifting system that treats every byte offset as a potential branch target, constructing a superset control flow graph that conservatively contains all feasible control flows. Statically unresolvable computed branches are reduced to lookups in a dispatch table pointing to translated control flow paths, eliminating runtime translation machinery on the target machine. A prototype recompiles x86-64 binaries to LLVM IR with no code/data heuristics and achieves fully static cross-compilation to AArch64 using unmodified LLVM backends.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

Researchers show LLM decompiler outputs can recompile yet diverge behaviorally, proposing the Decompile-Diverge fuzzing oracle to catch hidden changes.

The paper demonstrates that LLM-based decompilers can produce code that recompiles and passes all shipped tests yet diverges on other legitimate inputs—4.9% overall and up to 13% for one system—and can make disclosed vulnerabilities vanish without a visible crash. Across 300 real GitHub functions and 287 CVE-grounded functions, a refinement LLM lifted Ghidra's build rate from 75% to 90% while Matched rate fell from 74% to 62%, with up to one tenth of vulnerabilities showing Crash Absence. Decompile-Diverge detects these gaps by synthesizing drivers, growing fuzzing corpora from the reference, and rerunning decompiled code on identical inputs.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

BTR Reforged: Weaponizing Defender’s Remediation Driver as a Kernel Operation Primitive

Check Point shows attackers can abuse Microsoft Defender's signed remediation driver for arbitrary Ring 0 file and registry operations without exploiting any vulnerability.

Check Point Research presents BTR Reforged, a technique that repurposes Microsoft Defender's trusted remediation driver into an attacker-controlled kernel operation primitive. The signed driver can be instructed to execute arbitrary file and registry operations from Ring 0 without exploits, vulnerabilities, or memory corruption. The work demonstrates how trusted security components can be turned into attacker primitives, which is relevant for defenders assessing driver abuse risks.

Check Point Research · 27d agoResearch

Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks

Chris Domas explains at Black Hat how legal compiler optimizations can strip security checks and memory-clearing operations, turning secure C source into vulnerable binaries.

David Bombal interviews researcher Chris Domas at Black Hat USA 2026 about how the C abstract machine permits compilers to legally transform code in ways that remove security protections, delete memory-clearing operations, and introduce time-of-check to time-of-use vulnerabilities. Factors like register pressure, structure layout, and data size affect vulnerability, with examples where 17 or 33 byte buffers are safe while nearby sizes produce vulnerable code. An AI-assisted analysis of 500 million lines of open-source code identified 300 potentially dangerous patterns. Recommended mitigations include enabling compiler warnings, using sanitizers, analyzing optimized builds, and testing the exact binary that ships.

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research1

"They don't care about this": A Systematic Study of TEE Build Reproducibility in the Wild

91% of 115 surveyed TEE deployments across Intel SGX, TDX, and AMD SEV fail to provide reproducible builds needed for verifiable remote attestation.

A systematic study of 115 TEE deployments found 91% were not reproducible and 80% lacked both source code and a reference build, undermining remote attestation guarantees. Interviews with 12 developers of 50 Intel SGX projects confirmed that only one participant treats reproducibility as a development priority. The authors identify technical barriers such as embedded timestamps plus ecosystem-level issues like lack of build-environment control in multi-stakeholder projects, and call for holistic, committed reproducibility practices.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

When Models Edit Too Much: On the Fidelity of Minimal Code Edits

A 400-task BigCodeBench evaluation shows frontier LLMs widely over-edit code; a preservation instruction cuts excess edits and raises Pass@1 by 2.3 points.

Researchers built an evaluation framework from 400 BigCodeBench problems with injected AST-level corruptions, each with a known minimal patch, to measure over-editing in LLM code repair. Even strong models like GPT-5.5 produce unnecessarily large edits despite high Pass@1. Adding a preservation instruction reduced average excess Levenshtein distance from 0.195 to 0.131, cut added cognitive complexity by 26.6%, and raised Pass@1 by 2.3 points. Reinforcement learning post-training gave the best out-of-domain edit-fidelity trade-off, while supervised fine-tuning overfit to seen corruption patterns.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research1

Not All Relations Are Equal: Relation-Balanced and Calibrated Graph Learning for Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection

RECAL improves provenance-based APT detection with relation-balanced masked graph learning and calibrated errors, reaching 99.99% F1 on DARPA E3 datasets.

RECAL is an unsupervised framework for provenance-based intrusion detection that uses relation-balanced masked graph learning to capture rare interaction patterns, addressing statistical heterogeneity where relation frequencies differ by roughly 140,000X in CADETS. It calibrates reconstruction errors against each relation's benign error distribution to produce comparable anomaly evidence and reduce false alarms. On three DARPA E3 datasets, RECAL achieves F1 scores of 99.99%, 99.93%, and 99.99%, outperforming the best baseline on each dataset, and reduces mean false positive rate by approximately 105X, 4X, and 41X versus the lowest-FPR baseline.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Re: rosbridge_library Protocol.incoming() quadratic CPU cost in JSON fallback

David Wheeler notes a rosbridge_library quadratic CPU cost flaw was publicly disclosed on oss-security without prior coordination.

In an oss-security reply, David A. Wheeler pointed out that a poster had just publicly disclosed details of a quadratic CPU cost issue in rosbridge_library's Protocol.incoming() JSON fallback path. Wheeler referenced the mailing list's stated norms encouraging public discussion of open-source security flaws. The reply itself contains no fix, CVE, or exploitation details.

oss-security · 2d agoVulnerability 3 sources

Rust Supply Chain Attack on arrayref: Significant Overlap with DPRK Campaigns

Malicious versions of the Rust crate arrayref executed a compile-time backdoor, with infrastructure overlapping recent DPRK supply chain attacks on Mastra and axios.

Wiz researchers report that malicious versions of the arrayref Rust crate ran a backdoor during compilation, compromising developer build pipelines. The campaign's command-and-control infrastructure significantly overlaps with infrastructure used in recent DPRK supply chain attacks, including campaigns against Mastra and axios. Developers using affected crate versions should audit their builds and review dependencies.

Wiz Blog · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Forgetting Without Restarting: Execution-State Unlearning for Stateful LLM Agents

Researchers propose provenance-guided selective replay letting LLM agents forget revoked information without restarts, matching full reset behavior.

The paper formalizes execution-state unlearning for stateful LLM agents, requiring that agents behave as if a revoked memory record was never observed across transcripts, compressed memory, tool plans, and KV caches. It proves exact unlearning requires at least T-τ+1 recomputed transitions and that Provenance-Guided Selective Replay attains this bound via a provenance graph, KV cache cropping, and sanitized replay. In audits across three agent suites, nine baselines, and three model families, memory deletion left leakage unchanged, instruction-based forgetting collapsed under elicitation (Leak@probes = 1.00), and selective replay matched full resets at up to 9x fewer recomputed tokens.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoAI safety & security1

Sound Debloating of Redundant Checks in Zero-Knowledge Machine-Learning Circuits

Automated framework soundly removes up to 48.7% of redundant constraints in ezkl and zkml ZK-ML circuits, cutting prover time by up to 72.8%.

The framework uses whole-circuit abstract interpretation and a provenance graph to verify that each removed redundant check (range proofs, sign lookups, bit decompositions) remains entailed by the rest of the circuit, provably preserving soundness. It was evaluated on MLP, CNN, RNN, and transformer circuits generated by ezkl and zkml, with up to 25.3 million constraints. It removes up to 48.7% of constraints and reduces prover time by up to 72.8% without weakening security. Under-constrained circuits in deployed ZK systems have previously enabled attackers to forge transactions and bypass verification.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis

A pwning.systems write-up describes how LLM memory functionality was unexpectedly repurposed into a program analysis technique.

A security research post on pwning.systems describes the author's discovery that LLM memory behavior effectively functioned as program analysis. The write-up is hosted on a security-focused blog and surfaced via a security-tagged link aggregator. Detailed technical content is not included in this feed, limiting verifiable specifics.

Lobsters · security · 18d agoResearch1

Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs

RCWM reconstructs complex 3D worlds as executable code from a single image using recursive scene programs with global-local-global solver recursion.

The paper introduces Recursive Code World Models, coupling a Recursive Scene Program representation with a recursive construction solver for image-to-3D-world reconstruction. Each solver call establishes the whole scene, recursively reconstructs unresolved parts, and revisits the whole to refine composition, while a vision-language coding agent compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement. RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods, and ablations show deeper recursive calls improve fine-scale reconstruction.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

TasmScan: Continuation-Aware Taint Analysis for TVM Bytecode with Savelist Abstraction

TasmScan introduces source-free taint analysis for TON smart-contract bytecode, detecting 95.3% of defects with 96.8% precision and 17x speedup.

TasmScan is the first bytecode-level static analysis framework for the TON Virtual Machine, enabling cross-continuation data flow reasoning without source code by modeling savelist semantics through forward register analysis with formal over-approximation guarantees. It lifts bytecode into a typed intermediate representation (TASIR) and performs path-sensitive taint analysis. On a 208-contract benchmark with human-confirmed ground truth it detects 95.3% of defects across five classes at 96.8% precision, and resolves 294,546 dynamic continuation targets with 100% precision across 2,921 registry contracts. It achieves a 17x median speedup over symbolic-execution baselines.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Decomposition-Guided Diffusion Language Models for Inertial Confinement Fusion Prediction

ICF-DLM, the first language-model-based inertial confinement fusion predictor, cuts peak-timing error from 11.6 to 9.2 steps versus LLaMA-3-8B.

Each National Ignition Facility shot costs roughly one million dollars, motivating accurate AI surrogates for predicting 512-step neutron-rate waveforms from laser pulses and target parameters. ICF-DLM combines physics-typed decomposition into yield, peak timing, and local waveform; bidirectional denoising that defers commitment to peak location; and a physics-driven PPO reward. On ICFBench (50,000 simulations plus 232 experimental shots) it outperforms a matched autoregressive LLaMA-3-8B, classical sequence models, and LLM-based time-series predictors.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

Open-1B releases a 1B-parameter model with bitwise-reproducible training, letting independent auditors verify every step of the run on commodity hardware.

The paper introduces a 'fully auditable' tier of model transparency: every training operation is reproducible with bitwise certainty on heterogeneous commodity hardware by imposing definite ordering on GPU kernel reductions, data batch ordering, and collective communication. Because replaying a full run on one machine is infeasible, a collective verification scheme lets many independent auditors certify individual steps covering the whole run. The authors release Open-1B with its full pretraining dataset, every intermediate checkpoint, the training codebase, and an audit harness. This rules out undisclosed data, injected biases, or backdoors that proof-of-learning or proof-of-training-data techniques cannot exclude.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Vulnerabilities fixed in libxml2-2.15.4

libxml2 2.15.4 fixes an out-of-bounds read in xmlregexp's NXT macro plus several integer overflow and parsing flaws.

libxml2 2.15.4 (released September 1, 2026) includes security fixes: an out-of-bounds read in the xmlregexp NXT macro, missing overflow checks in dict.c, uri.c, and valid.c, an integer overflow in xmlIO before the writecallback, and an overflow check in xmlXPtrEvalXPtrPart. The release also propagates parseFlags in xmlXIncludeProcess and xmlXIncludeProcessTree. No CVE identifiers, exploitation, or severity ratings are given in the announcement.

oss-security · 12d agoVulnerability

Diffs vs. Whole Files: An Empirical Comparison of Iterative Edit-Based and Direct Generation for Flutter/Dart Code Models

Empirical study finds direct whole-file generation beats iterative diff-based editing for Flutter/Dart code models on about 1,790 held-out tasks.

Researchers trained Rainbow-Pony-100M from scratch and fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B in both direct-generation and diff-based regimes, then evaluated four resulting models on roughly 1,790 Flutter/Dart tasks. Direct generation outperformed diff-based generation on compilation pass rate, bits-per-byte, character-level similarity, and blinded LLM-judge ratings. Diff-based editing is competitive only on short, localized edits in refactoring and error-handling tasks, a property the authors call task locality.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research1

Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

Study shows nested-window Bi-LSTM architectures do not improve faster-than-Nyquist detection; pre-whitening plus BCJR distillation cuts bit error rates.

Across roughly 260 controlled trainings, processing nested intersymbol-interference windows in separate recurrent branches never significantly beat a plain Bi-LSTM at matched parameter budgets. The authors attribute the limitation to the observation model rather than architecture, and instead pre-whiten inputs and distill BCJR soft posteriors into the network. With 3.4% more parameters, the method reaches 1.05x the BCJR bit error rate at compression factor 0.8 and 1.89x at 0.7, improving to 1.47x with a wider whitened window.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

An Empirical Analysis of CodeQL False Positives and Query Refinements for Java Vulnerabilities

Study of 167 Java CVE instances finds CodeQL false positives follow recurring patterns; query refinements remove 81.8% of reviewed ones.

Researchers ran CodeQL's Java security query suite on 167 CVE instances from 110 projects, manually reviewing 500 sampled false-positive paths and building a five-category taxonomy led by Missed Path Constraint or Sanitization (36.6%), Benign Execution Context (29.4%), and Missing Trust Boundary Modeling (27.6%). Guided by the taxonomy, query-level refinements removed 81.8% of reviewed false positives and 15.8% of reported paths across the selected queries while retaining 7 of 8 true positives. To address generalization, agentic coding tools given the refinement patterns as templates adapted them to new projects successfully in 56% and 62% of tasks, versus 28% without guidance.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch1

How Lossless Is Lossless Speculative Decoding? The Role of Numerical Precision in Orthrus

Reproduction study finds Orthrus speculative-decoding trajectories match the reference model in only ~45% of cases under BF16, but 100% under FP32.

Researchers independently reproduced Orthrus, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion architecture claiming lossless speculative decoding via intra-model consensus, testing exact trajectory matching on 1,190 prompts across 12 domains. Under BF16, exact matching occurred in only 45% of cases for the authors' checkpoint and 43% for an independently trained model, with matching probability strongly tied to reference-model response-conditional perplexity. Despite trajectory divergence, downstream lm-eval-harness benchmarks showed no systematic degradation, while FP32 evaluation yielded exact matching on all prompts.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research1

Reduced-Space Multi-Fidelity Bayesian Optimization of Process Simulation Models

RS-MFBO couples global sensitivity analysis with fidelity-augmented Gaussian processes to slash costly high-fidelity simulation runs in industrial flowsheet optimization.

The paper presents RS-MFBO, a reduced-space multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization framework for high-dimensional, expensive black-box functions. It integrates Global Sensitivity Analysis for dimensionality reduction with a fidelity-augmented Gaussian process and a cost-aware acquisition strategy featuring cooldown and promotion mechanisms. Validation on a plasmid DNA bioprocess (SuperPro Designer) and a green fuel synthesis plant (Aspen HYSYS) shows substantial reductions in high-fidelity evaluations while remaining competitive with single-fidelity baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

graphql-go/graphql <= 0.8.1: quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule

Unauthenticated quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS disclosed in graphql-go/graphql up to v0.8.1 via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule; no fixed version exists.

Evgenios Gkritsis publicly disclosed an algorithmic-complexity denial-of-service flaw in github.com/graphql-go/graphql affecting all released versions up to and including v0.8.1. The defect is triggered via the OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule validation, is unauthenticated and network-reachable, and causes quadratic CPU exhaustion. No fixed version exists; the disclosure was public because the project has no private security-reporting channel or SECURITY.md.

oss-security · 2d agoVulnerability

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

Decomposition Buys Integrity, Not Yield

Study of 600 production deep-research traces finds agent-tree decomposition loses findings at rate N^(1-δ); flat architectures maximize yield.

The paper models multi-agent decomposition as a tree where an agent holding b items retains each with probability r(b); with r(b)=1/b every tree delivers exactly one finding regardless of shape. Analysis of 600 production deep-research traces estimates delta=0.34 retention decay, and 1,012 annotated traces show one brief in sixteen goes off-target per tier, giving an alignment penalty of 0.536. Depth still cuts root context exposure from N to N^(1/k) and is cheaper at scale, with a hazard model over 743,819 production tool calls showing delegation is an opening move rather than a response to filling context.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research