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4 stories in the last 7d

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 · 6d agoResearch1

Hackers Exploit Marimo RCE to Steal AWS Credentials and Reach Bastion Host in 8 Seconds

Attackers exploited pre-auth RCE CVE-2026-39987 in Marimo notebooks to steal AWS credentials and SSH into a bastion host in eight seconds.

Sysdig Threat Research Team documented an intrusion abusing CVE-2026-39987, an unauthenticated RCE in Marimo's terminal WebSocket endpoint affecting versions up to 0.20.4 and fixed in 0.23.0. The attacker harvested AWS credentials from the host environment and Redis backend, queried AWS Secrets Manager to retrieve an SSH private key, and authenticated to an internet-facing SSH bastion host just eight seconds after opening the WebSocket session. Human-operated custom tooling, not an AI agent, executed the full exploit-to-lateral-movement chain.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 21h agofirst · 1d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-39987

Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?

Amazon researchers explain why ML research agents avoid benchmark overfitting, attributing generalization to compressibility of successful strategies.

Amazon Science summarizes the paper "What fits (into few tokens) doesn't overfit: Compression and generalization in ML research agents," which investigates why benchmark hill-climbing loops, whether run by human communities or LLM research agents, do not produce rampant overfitting. The explanation formalizes Occam's razor via a counting argument: successful ML strategies are highly compressible, so short descriptions lack room to memorize benchmark data and must capture real structure. LLM-based agents, being resettable and controllable, allow this hypothesis to be tested empirically.

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 6d agoAI safety & security1