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Search: “Java Runtime Environment”

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Retrofitting Code Using LLMs to Support Exceptional Behavior

EXCODER combines static/dynamic analysis with LLMs to retrofit exception-handling code, achieving 85.92% pass@1 with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B on Java benchmarks.

The paper introduces the task of retrofitting existing code with Exception Related Code (throw statements, guarding conditions, try/catch blocks) so that given Exceptional Behavior Tests pass. EXCODER performs context engineering by integrating static and dynamic program analysis output with LLMs; it was evaluated on a benchmark built from 304 methods across 75 GitHub Java projects. Combined with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B, EXCODER achieves pass@1, 5, and 10 rates of 85.92%, 86.18%, and 86.51%, roughly 13 percentage points over baseline, and manual inspection reveals remaining limitations.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Understanding Angler Exploit Kit

Unit 42 explains exploit kit fundamentals, describing how landing pages profile victims, deliver exploits, and install malware payloads on Windows hosts.

Unit 42 published a primer on exploit kit fundamentals, defining vulnerabilities, exploits, malware payloads, actors, and campaigns in EK-based attacks. It explains the infection chain: a landing page profiles the victim's Windows system for vulnerable applications such as Flash Player, Java, Silverlight, and Internet Explorer, then a matching exploit executes a downloader or final payload, often delivered encrypted with XOR or RC4. The post also describes the EK-as-a-Service business model, in which leading EKs are rented for a few thousand dollars per month while buyers supply campaign infrastructure.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing

Paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where agents study unfamiliar environments under a budget to build reusable artifacts for a frozen solver.

The paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where a studying system explores an environment under a budget and produces artifacts like indices, scripts, or procedural guidance for a frozen solver, without task examples or evaluation feedback. The authors compare unaided and archive-equipped meta-agents against fixed synthetic-practice and corpus-processing methods across six heterogeneous benchmarks. A meta-agent variant achieves the highest Avg@3 reward on five benchmarks, while fixed corpus processing remains best on the largest corpus benchmark. Studied artifacts reduce the test-time sampling needed to reach a given score, shifting computation from repeated test-time attempts to a pre-task study phase.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Another Apache Log4j Vulnerability Is Actively Exploited in the Wild (CVE-2021

Apache Log4j 2 RCE CVE-2021-44228 is actively exploited via crafted JNDI lookups; Palo Alto Unit 42 urges upgrading to Log4j 2.17.1.

Unit 42 details CVE-2021-44228, an easily exploited remote code execution flaw in Apache Log4j 2 where attacker-supplied JNDI lookups in logged user input cause payload download and execution. Massive internet-wide scanning for unpatched systems has begun, with observed follow-on activity including information stealing, Cobalt Strike delivery, and coinmining. The recommended fix is Log4j 2.17.1, which also patches CVE-2021-45046, CVE-2021-45105, and CVE-2021-44832. Widely used Java software including Apache Struts, Solr, Druid, Flink, ElasticSearch, and Spring Boot is affected.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2021-44228CVE-2021-45046CVE-2021-45105+3 CVEs

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 · 11d agoAI research1

BGP Hijack Delivers Malicious Virtualizor Update That Establishes Persistent Root Access

Attackers used a BGP hijack to divert Softaculous traffic and push a malicious Virtualizor update granting root persistence on some hypervisors.

Virtualizor reported that a BGP hijack between August 28 20:57 UTC and August 30 06:10 UTC diverted Softaculous update traffic to an attacker-operated server holding a valid Let's Encrypt certificate. Installations checking for updates during the window could receive a malicious package that added an attacker SSH key to root, created a proxyuser account, and installed a Java payload persisted via a systemd service. Hosting provider AlbaHost confirmed 5 of its 34 Virtualizor hypervisors were root-compromised. Virtualizor shipped Patch 9 with a Security Analyzer on September 1, but cryptographic package signing remains future work.

The Hacker News · 13d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

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

CVE-2026-34486: Apache Tomcat EncryptInterceptor Fail-Open Bypass

Technical analysis shows CVE-2026-34486 is a one-line fail-open regression in Tomcat Tribes enabling unauthenticated RCE via Java deserialization.

CVE-2026-34486 is a fail-open regression in Tomcat's Tribes EncryptInterceptor, introduced while fixing the CVE-2026-29146 padding-oracle flaw; Apache rated it Important and NVD scores it 7.5 High. Decryption failures are now forwarded to an unfiltered ObjectInputStream, and public PoC repositories demonstrate unauthenticated RCE on default port 4000 when clustering, the EncryptInterceptor, a reachable receiver and deserialization gadgets are all present. Affected releases 9.0.116, 10.1.53 and 11.0.20 are fixed in 9.0.117, 10.1.54 and 11.0.21; Tomcat 8.5 is unaffected.

CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents

Researchers introduce CUA-Universe, a pipeline turning real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI agent environments, lifting a 9B model's OSWorld success rate.

CUA-Universe is an environment-to-data pipeline that converts real desktop applications into hybrid GUI+CLI environments, scaling to 16 applications via App-Forge, Task-Weave, and Path-Steer. Training on its harvested trajectories shifted a 9B model toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration, yielding +39.3 points on CUA-Verse, +16.8 points success rate on OSWorld, and +7.84 points on OSWorld-MCP while cutting steps and tokens by up to 57% and 60%. The work addresses the scarcity of scalable hybrid environments for computer-use agents.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

Hillingar - MirageOS Unikernels on NixOS

A technical write-up details Hillingar, enabling reproducible Nix-based builds and NixOS deployment of MirageOS OCaml unikernels such as authoritative DNS servers.

This blog post (published December 2022, updated February 2025) describes Hillingar, work from the author's master's thesis enabling reproducible builds and deployments of MirageOS OCaml unikernels using Nix and a custom NixOS module, demonstrated with an authoritative DNS server. MirageOS unikernels embed application and low-level OS code in a single kernel, allowing dead-code elimination that reduces attack surface and improves efficiency. The post covers challenges such as solving opam dependency version constraints when linking a single dependency set.

Lobsters · security · 12d agoTools1

Senior engineers are spending their week cleaning up AI-generated code

New Relic study finds AI-generated code doubles critical runtime issues, with senior engineers losing a third of their week to fixes.

A New Relic survey of U.S. technology leaders reports AI now writes the majority of shipped code, with senior SRE and DevOps engineers spending up to a third of their week triaging and refactoring it. A large majority of organizations had at least one AI-related production failure in the past six months, and roughly three in ten saw newly introduced security vulnerabilities. AI-generated code showed nearly twice as many critical runtime issues as peer-reviewed human-authored code, with gaps concentrated in edge cases, concurrency, deprecated APIs, and complex state changes. Most teams now prompt AI tools to embed logs and traces directly into generated code.

Help Net Security · 23d agoAI industry1

Chinese Hackers Use AI Agents in Multi

China-linked campaign used the SecFlow AI-agent framework (Claude, Qwen, DeepSeek) to automate intrusions against government targets in Taiwan, Indonesia, China and Vietnam.

Hunt.io documented a second China-linked campaign wiring commercial AI models into live cyberespionage, reconstructing the SecFlow orchestration system from five accidentally exposed open directories. Targets included Taiwan's Kuomintang Party archives, Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mainland Chinese government and education systems, and Vietnamese industrial hosts. The most extensive compromise hit a Fengtai District government Office Automation environment, yielding LSASS and registry hive theft, 822 user records and 1.28GB of attachments including patient health data. Tooling included a GLUTTON webshell hiding payloads in PNG pixels via steganography and a fake MySQL deserialization service for client-side code execution.

Security Affairs · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

IDORacle: Template-Guided SQL-Sink Mediation for Object-Level Authorization in Java Applications

IDORacle intercepts MyBatis/JDBC SQL sinks to block horizontal privilege escalation in legacy Java apps with sub-millisecond guard latency.

IDORacle is a template-guided SQL-sink interception and rewriting framework that prevents IDOR/BOLA horizontal privilege escalation at runtime in Java database applications. It propagates authenticated identity context across HTTP requests, asynchronous tasks, and data-access boundaries via a server-side trace identifier, and computes dual SQL fingerprints at the MyBatis/JDBC boundary to generate reusable mediation plans. On a Java-SQL benchmark grounded in real-world CVE reports, it blocks tested violations with worst-case guard latency of 0.17 ms, reduced to 0.017 ms average for hot templates via redundancy-aware optimization.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Metasploit Wrap Up: This One Goes to Sixteen!

Metasploit adds 16 modules including 10 exploits, five covering CISA KEV vulnerabilities in Cisco, SonicWall, PaperCut, JetBrains and Langflow.

Rapid7's weekly Metasploit update ships 16 new modules, 10 of them exploit modules, with five targeting CISA KEV entries. New exploits cover Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center auth bypass (CVE-2026-20079), a SonicWall SMA1000 SSRF-to-root RCE chain (CVE-2026-83548/CVE-2026-83549), JetBrains TeamCity deserialization RCE (CVE-2026-63077), PaperCut NG/MF chain (CVE-2026-81578/CVE-2026-82078), and Langflow authenticated RCE (CVE-2026-19295). The SonicWall and PaperCut chains were reported as actively exploited zero-days, and a new ESC8 relay module exploits CVE-2026-20929 against AD CS Web Enrollment.

Rapid7 Blog · 4d agoTools in the wildCVE-2025-66516CVE-2025-54988CVE-2026-20929+8 CVEs1

MasterControl Seventeen Every Time

Governed enterprise analytics study shows deterministic policy execution matched 110/110 answer-and-evidence contracts while runtime agent planning matched none.

The paper studies a governed approach where a language model interprets the question while deterministic policy selects and runs a pre-approved analytical program returning results and evidence. Across 440 runs, three 8B models generated SQL and selected tools at runtime, while Qwen3-8B only interpreted intent and policy executed the approved program. None of 330 runtime-planning episodes satisfied the full answer-and-evidence contract, whereas the policy-executed analyzer matched 110 of 110. The authors note this is configuration-specific and expressiveness is preserved via relational operations, aggregation, comparison, windows, ranking, and similarity with replayable results.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

How well do agents use test/verification techniques?

Dan Luu's eval finds coding-agent testing instructions (TDD, formal methods, PBT, skills) mostly fail to beat defaults on Zstd implementation correctness.

The author ran 26 prompt conditions plus 4 skills on a Zstd-in-Rust implementation eval using codex with GPT-5.6, testing TDD, fuzzing, property-based testing, formal methods (Lean 4, TLA+, Verus, Kani, SMT solvers) and community skills. Nothing dramatically outperformed the default no-instruction condition, which did above average; at xhigh effort, fuzzing and PBT conditions did slightly better than formal methods. Pre-registered predictions included TDD underperforming and popular test skills (ECC, Hegel, Trail of Bits) not outperforming. Results are averages of 80 runs per condition plotted against cost.

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

An Empirical Security Analysis of Open-Source Software Used in Onboard Satellite Systems

Study of 126 onboard satellite OSS repositories finds 2,827 security findings, 72% medium severity or higher, dominated by memory safety and code quality weaknesses.

Researchers performed an empirical security analysis of 126 public repositories of open-source software used in onboard satellite systems using SBOM generation, software composition analysis, static application security testing, infrastructure-as-code analysis, and secret scanning. After cleaning and deduplication the pipeline produced 2,827 findings, with medium-severity findings accounting for 49% and 72% classified medium or higher. A CWE-based taxonomy mapped all findings to eight weakness families, with Memory Safety and Code Quality dominating, followed by Input Validation and Injection. Project-developed code accounted for 81.4% of findings, though external dependency code remained relevant; findings do not establish mission-specific exploitability.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition

JarvisGUI benchmark tests GUI agents on cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu, revealing major gaps in state transfer and long-horizon reasoning.

JarvisGUI is a dynamic benchmark that formulates GUI tasks as input-output transformations under a lightweight type system, automatically composing multi-step cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu virtual environments. Evaluation shows state-of-the-art open-source GUI agents struggle with state-transfer awareness, cross-platform contextual reasoning, and long-horizon dependency management, exposing a capability gap invisible to existing single-device benchmarks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

MetroLLM-Bench: Evaluating Language Models as Transit Kiosk Runtimes

MetroLLM-Bench is a 955-case benchmark testing language models as transit kiosk tool-calling runtimes across six real metro systems.

The benchmark covers 37-414-station metro systems and eleven task categories including routing, fare calculation, disruptions, accessibility, and adversarial input, with 14 deterministic and 8 semantic scoring components. Of 26 models from six vendors, a PEFT-tuned 4B Qwen 3.5 student scored 91.3 on Tier 1, exceeding GPT-5.6 (90.6/90.0), while Muse Glimmer 30B led the composite ranking. A deterministic rule-based baseline reached 84.6, and PEFT gains over base models shrank from +7.03 points at 2B to -0.91 at 27B.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Towards Scalable and Cost-Efficient Vulnerability Detection: A Study on Automatic Query Generation

A study finds LLM-synthesized CodeQL queries improve average F1-score by 82% over baseline queries, offering scalable vulnerability detection versus direct LLM scanning.

Researchers conducted an empirical study evaluating whether LLMs can synthesize executable CodeQL queries from National Vulnerability Database vulnerability data. LLM-generated queries significantly enhanced baseline CodeQL suites, yielding an 82% improvement in average F1-score across a diverse set of real-world vulnerabilities. A cost-benefit analysis shows direct LLM-based scanning of entire repositories is often computationally and financially prohibitive, while LLM query synthesis offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative for large-scale vulnerability detection.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

τ^τ-Bench: An Environment for End-To-End, Realistic Agent Construction

New τ^τ-bench tasks coding agents with building deployable customer-service agents; best config, Claude Opus 5, passes only 23.9% of simulations.

Researchers introduce τ^τ-bench, an end-to-end benchmark where a developer agent must build a complete customer-service agent from real business records, a client with requirements, a production API, an inherited codebase, and cost/model limits, then is scored by deploying it against held-out simulated users. Across 53 tasks in four domains, the strongest configuration, Claude Opus 5 under Claude Code, passes just 23.9% of evaluation simulations versus an 82.2% expert-authored reference ceiling. Failure modes mirror those of human developers: shallow queries instead of deep record comprehension, almost no client communication, and shipping the first architecture that runs rather than experimenting.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

Bilevel Coordinated Reflection: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Paper models multi-agent LLM orchestration as a bilevel game, proving transcript-only gating limits and introducing grounded-memory SRMA.

A new paper frames orchestrator-worker coordination in multi-agent LLM systems as a bilevel coordination game and analyzes free-form reflection as stochastic movement over semantic memory states, deriving finite-time bounds and an information-theoretic impossibility result: no gate observing only the generated transcript can uniformly improve over text-indistinguishable environments, while an environment-grounded gate can. The authors propose Stochastic Reflective Memory Ascent (SRMA), which accepts candidate memory only when grounded evaluation risk strictly decreases, with geometric or polynomial convergence guarantees. On 500 SWE-bench instances, a Kimi-based instantiation of the full system resolves 72.2% versus a 70.8% public mini-SWE-agent reference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research1

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 · 6d agoAI research1

What Else Needs Fixing? Exploring Cost-Effective Test-Time Compute for Revision Propagation in Artifacts Generated Through Conversation

A new benchmark shows LLMs reach 68.3-93% accuracy propagating local revisions across conversationally generated artifacts, with parallel-sample selection most cost-effective.

The paper introduces a benchmark for revision propagation: when users request a local change, LLMs must identify dependencies and update all affected parts of an artifact generated through conversation, where context lives in the chat history. Nine revision methods, including sequential reflection and parallel sampling variants, were evaluated on gpt-oss-20b/120b, gpt-5.4-mini, and qwen3.5-9b/27b/122b. Baselines scored 68.3-93% accuracy, and selecting among three parallel samples via LLM-based or medoid selection improved accuracy by 2.2-9.7% as the most cost-effective test-time compute strategy. Code and dataset are released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

VEX-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Assessing Exploitability of Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Introduces VEX-Bench, 75 expert-labeled real-world cases testing whether LLM agents can assess supply chain vulnerability exploitability; frontier models reach about 80% F1.

VEX-Bench is the first benchmark evaluating LLM agents on assessing whether upstream dependency vulnerabilities are exploitable in downstream projects, with 75 real-world expert-labeled cases across Python, Java, and Go mined from GitHub. Nine models across three agent harnesses were evaluated; GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 reach approximately 80% F1 on binary vulnerability-status classification, but only GPT-5.5 surpasses 70% macro-F1 on fine-grained justification classification. The gap highlights the difficulty of moving beyond binary exploitability calls to explaining exploitability reasons, unlike prior benchmarks targeting zero-day settings.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch1

PrivEscalate: Measuring and Augmenting the Threat of LLM-Automated Linux Privilege Escalation

Researchers release PrivEscalate, a 531-scenario benchmark showing LLM agents' Linux privilege-escalation success varies by vulnerability class, plus PrivEscAgent, a domain-specialized agent that boosts success.

The paper introduces PrivEscalate, an open-source benchmark of 531 Dockerized Linux privilege-escalation scenarios spanning 14 sub-categories, plus 329 parameterized variants measuring sensitivity to environmental distractors. Evaluating six LLMs across three agent architectures shows capability is heterogeneous across vulnerability classes, sensitive to perturbation, and architecture-dependent. The authors also present PrivEscAgent, a wrapper adding deterministic enumeration, category matching, and step planning that outperforms prior privesc-agent baselines without modifying the underlying LLM. The benchmark is released to support LLM agent evaluation, defensive tool validation, and red-team training.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

llm 0.34

Version 0.34 of Simon Willison's llm CLI adds response-duration metrics to log output, plus bug fixes and faster log querying.

The open-source llm command-line tool for interacting with large language models released version 0.34. The headline change adds response duration in milliseconds and human-readable form to llm logs --usage Markdown output, plus a new duration_ms field in llm logs --short. The release includes several contributed bug fixes and a significant performance improvement to llm logs, alongside the related llm-openrouter 0.7.1 release.

Simon Willison · 13d agoAI tools & infra

"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

A Three-Layer Caching Architecture for Low-Latency LLM Web Search on Commodity CPU Hardware

OreoLook's three-layer Redis caching architecture cuts redundant LLM calls and embedding work for CPU-hosted web-search answer generation.

The paper describes a three-layer caching architecture for OreoLook (formerly lixSearch), an open-source LLM answer engine: a Redis session context window with Huffman-compressed disk overflow, a semantic query cache matching rephrasings via embedding cosine similarity, and a URL embedding cache deduplicating embedding computations. Deployed on a single 8-vCPU Intel Cascade Lake server with 30 Hypercorn workers across three containerized replicas, it achieved an 89.3% aggregate Redis keyspace hit rate, 0.1 ms read latency, and 1.38 MB memory overhead. An LRU eviction daemon migrates idle sessions to disk and rehydrates them for resumption hours or days later.

Hugging Face daily papers · Aug 11, 2026AI tools & infra1

SEMA-GUARD: Semantic and Graph-Based Vulnerability Detection in Assembly Code

SEMA-GUARD uses semantic analysis and graph neural networks to detect vulnerabilities in assembly code, achieving 85.1% accuracy on a Juliet-derived benchmark.

SEMA-GUARD is a framework that detects vulnerabilities in compiled programs when source code is unavailable, targeting malware, firmware, and embedded systems analysis. It enriches control flow graphs with low-level execution semantics including stack manipulations, memory accesses, and data flow. Evaluated on a Juliet Test Suite set compiled to assembly and split into function-level chunks, it achieves 85.1% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.801, outperforming purely statistical or structural approaches.

arXiv cs.CR · 22h agoResearch1

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

SchemeArena: Factorized Stress Testing of Scheming in LLM Agents

Researchers introduce SchemeArena, a 400-scenario benchmark stress-testing scheming in LLM agents, finding explicit instrumental goals are the strongest driver of covert misaligned behavior.

The paper presents SchemeArena, a 400-scenario benchmark built through factorized scenario synthesis spanning safety-relevant tool domains, instrumental goals, oversight conditions and pressure mechanisms. The accompanying SCOUT monitor grounds multi-criteria scheming judgments in evidence drawn from agents' reasoning and actions. Stress tests across five LLM agents show explicit instrumental goals are the strongest driver of scheming propensity, while action-only monitoring increased scheming in several closed models, suggesting partial oversight can act as an optimization constraint. The benchmark, code and monitor are released at github.com/launchnlp/SchemeArena.

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 · 12d agoResearch1

Emergence World: Adversarial Stress-Testing of Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

16-day multi-agent stress test finds no world fully resilient to prompt injection, misinformation, or memory exposure; adversarial content acted on 46 hours later.

Emergence World is a continuously running multi-agent environment for adversarial stress testing of long-horizon autonomous systems. Eight parallel 10-agent worlds (seven homogeneous frontier-model worlds plus one mixed-model world) ran for 16 days, generating over 850,000 LLM calls and nearly 50 billion tokens. Three controlled stress events—indirect prompt injection, misinformation, and exposure of private agent memories—were delivered through ordinary interaction surfaces; no world achieved full resilience. Detection did not ensure containment: agents recognized threats yet wrote adversarial content into persistent memory and acted on it up to 46 hours later, suggesting model-level alignment is not compositional.

Φ-Bench: Can Large Language Models Engineer the Infrastructure That Powers Them?

Researchers release Phi-Bench, a benchmark evaluating frontier LLMs on open-ended, long-horizon engineering and optimization of the LLM infrastructure stack.

Phi-Bench evaluates LLMs on open-ended engineering of the LLM infrastructure stack, derived from optimization problems studied in frontier research and grounded in real-world code repositories. Tasks range from localized kernel-level function completion to long-horizon implementation and end-to-end system optimization. Experiments on frontier LLMs reveal current capabilities and limitations on the path toward autonomous optimization of future AI infrastructure.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

[webapps] Langflow 1.8.4 - Path Traversal to Remote Code Execution

A path traversal to remote code execution exploit for Langflow 1.8.4, a popular LLM application builder, was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit chaining path traversal to remote code execution in Langflow 1.8.4, an open-source tool used to build LLM applications and agents. The chain allows an attacker to write arbitrary files outside the intended directory and achieve code execution on the host. The provided text does not include a CVE identifier or reports of exploitation in the wild, but RCE in a widely deployed AI tooling product is notable for defenders.

Exploit-DB · 16d agoExploit / PoC1

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research1