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CVE-2026-86466: Apache Airflow FAB provider: FAB Authentik provider: id_token issuer/audience not validated

Apache Airflow FAB provider before 3.9.0 skips issuer/audience validation on Authentik id_tokens, allowing tokens minted for other clients to authenticate to Airflow.

CVE-2026-86466 affects apache-airflow-providers-fab before 3.9.0. The Authentik OAuth path in the FAB auth manager does not validate the issuer or audience claims of accepted id_tokens. An attacker holding a token minted by the same Authentik identity provider for a different client application can present it to Airflow and be authenticated. Severity is rated moderate by the reporter.

Inside Knight Office, a New M365 AiTM Phishing Kit

Huntress details Knight Office, a new AiTM phishing kit stealing Microsoft 365 session tokens and registering attacker-controlled devices.

Huntress investigated an August 18, 2026 adversary-in-the-middle attack using the Knight Office phishing kit, which captured Microsoft 365 session tokens via a DocuSign-style lure routed through a Monday.com tracking link and a compromised Joomla site. After token capture, the actor enrolled an unauthorized host in Microsoft Entra ID and bound a Windows Hello for Business key credential to the account. The kit's operator console, found at IP 104.37.188.94, is built on Python Flask and hosts at least 25 .vu phishing domains. Telemetry links the kit to at least nine token-replay logins in two weeks and roughly 700 reported lure emails since April.

Huntress · 13d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

CVE-2026-75156: Apache Airflow FAB provider: FAB Azure AD OAuth: id_token issuer/audience not validated — cross-tenant authentication bypass

Apache Airflow FAB provider flaw (CVE-2026-75156) lets attackers bypass Azure AD OAuth token validation via unvalidated issuer and audience claims.

Apache Airflow FAB provider versions 3.7.3 through 3.8.0 do not validate the issuer or audience of Azure AD id_tokens during OAuth login, enabling cross-tenant authentication bypass. The issue affects deployments where the FAB auth manager is configured with Azure AD as an OAuth provider. A fix is available in version 3.8.1. Severity is rated moderate.

oss-security · 7d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-75156

Right Tool, Right Job: Native-Language Evaluation, Tokenizer Sensitivity, and Methodological Findings from a French-Only BabyLM

French BabyLM entry METRON-FR (125M GPT-2, 92.47M words) shows tokenizer artifacts dominate child-scale zero-shot evaluation; proposes standard diagnostics.

METRON-FR is a 125M-parameter GPT-2 pretrained on 92.47M French words, submitted to the BabyLM 2026 Strict track, scoring 85.97% on the native Quebec-French QFrBLiMP benchmark and 62.80% on the BabyLM-weighted leaderboard. A cross-lingual GLUE protocol combining French task-data translation with rank-16 LoRA shows relational tasks gain while world-knowledge tasks regress. Bilingual Lexicon Induction reaches p@1 of 68.84%, 18x above chance, and ablations show single-token zero-shot scoring is dominated by tokenizer and template artifacts at child scale.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 16h agoAI research

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

USN-8770-1: SimpleSAMLphp vulnerabilities

Ubuntu patches SimpleSAMLphp signature validation and XXE flaws enabling user impersonation, privilege escalation, and information disclosure.

Ubuntu security notice USN-8770-1 fixes multiple SimpleSAMLphp vulnerabilities. CVE-2019-3465 stems from incorrect cryptographic signature validation in XML messages, allowing an authenticated attacker to impersonate users or gain elevated privileges; it only affected Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS. CVE-2024-52596 involves improper handling of external entities when parsing untrusted XML, allowing a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information, and did not affect Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. An additional flaw in signature verification for SAML messages using the HTTP-Redirect binding is also addressed.

Access Control as Verified Parse Constraints

Researchers verify a class of EverParse validators that correctly enforce access-control policies, deploying a machine-checked enforcement gate on seL4.

The paper targets enforcement-code bugs in commercial security gateways by proving that forward-only, backtrack-free EverParse validators are verified recognizers for a bounded finite-state class that includes access-control decision functions with fixed-offset fields and bounded disjunction. Encoding a bounded policy language into a fixed-size byte buffer allows an SMT solver to verify the enforcement code once, covering all byte values, policies, requests, and sessions. Editing rule content over a fixed endpoint set requires no new proof, while adding endpoints reruns the toolchain. A deployment on the seL4 microkernel ensures every request passes through the gate and unverified components cannot corrupt the enforcement chain.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

LexFlip releases 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving tokens, exposing weaknesses in embedding-based meaning preservation metrics.

LexFlip provides 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving 0.93 of tokens, creating dissociation items that break monotone token-overlap metric validation. The seven embedding and BERTScore metrics tested register only 0.022-0.039 of their identical-to-unrelated range on these edits, versus 0.670 for bidirectional NLI. Against FrJudge, with a measured human ceiling of r=0.597, a bare length feature outscores every semantic metric tested.

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

Approval Integrity and Recovery in LLM Answer Publication

Study measures approval integrity in Lightcap LLM answer publication, finding the 14B response-act checker accepts 291 of 302 unsupported answers.

The study evaluates exact-content binding, authorization freshness, and checkpoint recovery in Lightcap's publication enforcement using 3,600 assessments over 900 human-annotated RAGTruth responses from three Ministral models. The production 14B response-act checker accepts 291 of 302 unsupported answers versus 41 for a direct-grounding baseline, with supported-answer retention of 95.2% versus 66.9%. A stateful recheck-recovery policy increases exact-match error by 9.23 percentage points relative to initial checkpoints, and controlled evidence-fingerprint changes expose asymmetric freshness enforcement between publication and recovery. A separate BIPIA prompt-injection experiment records zero target insertions among 266 valid editor outputs.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

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

Understanding the Usability of Cryptographic Verification Tools

Survey of Tamarin and ProVerif users reveals usability barriers: debugging non-termination, model validation, and opaque proof failures hinder cryptographic protocol verification.

The paper presents an exploratory human-centered survey of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with hands-on experience using Tamarin, ProVerif, and related cryptographic protocol verification tools. Findings reveal usability barriers across the verification workflow, including difficulties debugging non-termination and performance issues plus the lack of systematic methods for validating formal models against real protocols. When proofs fail without concrete attacks, users commonly simplify models, add helper lemmas, and revisit modeling abstractions. Participants called for actionable diagnostics, clearer explanations of results, visualization, and automation for recurring proof tasks.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

CVE-2026-86304: MojoX::Authentication versions before 0.006 for Perl allow SAML authentication bypass because parse_assertion builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor

MojoX::Authentication before 0.006 for Perl allows SAML authentication bypass because parse_assertion builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor (CVE-2026-86304).

CVE-2026-86304 affects MojoX::Authentication versions before 0.006 for Perl. The parse_assertion function builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor, so SAML assertions are not validated against a trusted signing key, enabling authentication bypass. The flaw is fixed in version 0.006 of the module.

oss-security · 9d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-86304

18 ways to check whether data can be trusted for AI

ETSI published TR 104 180 defining 18 data quality metrics, including fairness and privacy, to assess whether datasets are fit for AI.

ETSI's technical report TR 104 180 defines 18 metrics across four groups - intrinsic quality, usability and lineage, fairness, and privacy - each with calculation formulas, plus an open-source tool that scores datasets. Testing on an aircraft engine sensor dataset and a US census dataset revealed a roughly threefold gender gap in high earners (about 31% of men versus 11% of women) and two privacy failures: re-identification via age, race, sex, and country, and sensitive fields stored in plaintext. The working group included Sejong University, EGM, TTA, Daejeon University, and CNIT.

Help Net Security · 9d agoAI policy

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on 40K rebuttal-derived instances with rubric rewards to generate actionable, grounded peer-review feedback, plus a 1,000-instance benchmark.

The framework builds ActReview-40K from real OpenReview review-rebuttal threads, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding feedback in localized paper evidence. Qwen3-8B-Base is post-trained with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. Experiments show improved actionability and grounding over prior specialized review-generation models, supported by ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance evaluation set. Human evaluation confirms better revision usefulness while noting a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

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

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on OpenReview rebuttals to generate actionable peer-review feedback with grounded revision suggestions, benchmarked on 1,000 curated instances.

The paper defines Actionable Peer-review Generation as diagnostic claim generation plus revision suggestion generation and introduces ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework. From OpenReview review-rebuttal threads the authors build ActReview-40K, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses grounded in localized paper evidence, and post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task SFT followed by GRPO using weakness-specific rubric rewards. They also release ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance benchmark, on which ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness but identifies a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

A self-distillation safety framework tunes narrow-boundary refusals in Qwen3-8B, raising target-domain refusal to 84.75% while cutting over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%.

The paper formulates narrow-boundary safety, where deployments need refusals within specific topics rather than whole subjects, and proposes an offline self-generated framework with controlled topic generation, escalating retries, and harmful-benign boundary pairs. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, the method raised target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and cut the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.14%. Verified target-model responses reduced over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%, and boundary-pair data cut comply-side over-refusal on held-out pairs from 32.94% to 4.16%. Results show data composition controls the safety-usability trade-off and alignment should be evaluated on both sides of the refusal boundary.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI safety & security1

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

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

Cross-Model Agreement as a Deployment-Time Reliability Signal for Automatic Polyp Segmentation

Referee-Based Quality Estimation flags unreliable polyp segmentations at inference without ground truth, reaching ROC-AUC 0.960 with SegFormer-B0 referees.

RBQE measures agreement between a primary segmentation model and an independently trained referee on a 1,223-image external benchmark drawn from four public datasets. A cross-architecture SegFormer-B0 referee achieves the strongest signal (ROC-AUC 0.960), beating a Test-Time Augmentation baseline by 0.055 ROC-AUC under an identical protocol. Excluding trivially separable empty-mask cases, ROC-AUC falls to 0.876 (SegFormer-B0) and 0.783 (same-architecture control), but RBQE's margin over baselines widens. Progressive rejection of low-agreement predictions increases mean Dice of retained outputs, supporting selective prediction at the cost of one extra forward pass.

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

E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning

E2A-Bench, a 969-query financial chart reasoning benchmark, finds VLMs fail evidence-to-action consistency, with fine-tuning amplifying BUY:SELL bias 4-6x.

E2A-Bench is a 969-query benchmark built from 323 HS300 constituents across three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors, evaluating grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage via UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR metrics. Testing 20 VLMs showed the lowest-hallucination model ranked near the bottom on coverage with only 6.4% directional coverage, and oracle-aided verification reduced unsupported claims but could collapse coverage. Financial fine-tuning amplified the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across base-fine-tuned pairs.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

Engineered Persuasion: Evaluating Personalized Pretexts in LLM-Generated Spear Phishing

A study of 180 US workers found each LLM phishing personalization level raised click-intention odds by 28%, but credibility depends on context fit.

The arXiv paper evaluates how personalized pretexts in LLM-generated spear phishing affect perceived credibility, using 180 US working adults across 1,436 evaluations of emails with four cumulative personalization levels, from workplace context to shared-project details. Convincingness rose 2.40 points per level in sensitivity analysis and click-intention odds increased 28% per level, while non-clickers shifted toward deleting rather than reporting. Qualitative coding showed details matching the recipient's role and routines supported credibility, whereas incorrect, vague, or channel-inappropriate details raised suspicion. The authors argue personalization effectiveness depends on pretext fit, with implications for workplace security training.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

The inconvenient truth about AI pentesting: someone has to check all the work

Survey of 158 practitioners shows AI pentesting floods teams with findings, creating 'validation debt' most teams cannot process.

The article argues AI pentesting creates 'validation debt': discovery scales far faster than teams' ability to verify AI-generated findings. In a survey of 158 practitioners, only 20.3% had workflows to triage more than 500 AI-generated candidates per engagement, while 29.7% called such volume unmanageable. One respondent spent two days validating 300 AI findings, of which 250 were duplicates, non-exploitable, or nonexistent. The author recommends capacity planning, ruthless deduplication, and risk-based prioritization before adopting AI pentesting tools.

Security Affairs · Aug 11, 2026Industry

BGP Role model: tracking the adoption of RFC 9234

Cloudflare measured RFC 9234 adoption, finding BGP Role deployment growing but two Tier 1 networks unexpectedly stripping the Only to Customer attribute.

Cloudflare analyzed adoption of RFC 9234, which introduces BGP Roles and the Only to Customer (OTC) attribute allowing routers to reject route leaks on their own. The measurement study assessed who has deployed the mechanism in the global routing table. It found two Tier 1 networks unexpectedly stripping OTC attributes, which could undermine leak protection.

Cloudflare Blog · 28d agoResearch

Knowing What Not to Answer: Selective Non-Compliance in Vision-Language Models

Researchers introduce KoNA, a benchmark exposing vision-language models' failures at selective non-compliance, plus fine-tuning that improves refusal and abstention accuracy.

KoNA is a benchmark for evaluating selective non-compliance in vision-language models across five categories: False Premise, Visual Inaccessibility, Universal Unknown, Task Feasibility and Safety. It tests both query-level and component-level non-compliance using paired single and compound queries, and evaluations across diverse VLMs show models often fail to refuse, correct or abstain appropriately, with failures worsening on compound queries. Fine-tuning VLMs on KoNA examples substantially improves non-compliance accuracy while largely maintaining performance on fully answerable tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research1

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

CVE-2026-86219: Authen::SASL::Perl::DIGEST_MD5 versions before 2.2100 for Perl accept replayed authentication responses via unverified nonce in server_step

Authen::SASL::Perl::DIGEST_MD5 before 2.2100 for Perl accepts replayed DIGEST-MD5 authentication responses via unverified nonce handling (CVE-2026-86219).

CVE-2026-86219 affects Authen::SASL::Perl::DIGEST_MD5 versions before 2.2100 for Perl. The server_step function does not verify the nonce, allowing replayed authentication responses to be accepted in DIGEST-MD5 SASL exchanges. The fix is available in version 2.2100 of the perl-authen-sasl distribution.

oss-security · 9d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-862191

Performance of Clinical AI System and Physicians and Frontier Language Models in primary care diagnostics

Clinical AI system Doctorina achieved 82.0% primary-care diagnostic concordance versus 57.0% for physicians across 150 synthetic consultations.

The study compared Doctorina, eight physicians, and four standalone frontier language models on 150 synthetic Polish-language primary-care consultations. Doctorina achieved 82.0% Top-1 diagnostic concordance versus 57.0% for physicians (25.0-point difference, 95% CI 17.7-32.7) and 97.3% versus 85.0% primary-or-reference-differential concordance. Normalized workup and treatment scores were 89.4 versus 66.9 and 83.7 versus 61.2. Kimi K3 ranked next on diagnosis, while Claude Opus 5 led the closely spaced management estimates among Opus, Doctorina and Kimi.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

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

Accountability in Certificate Transparency and Variants

Formal Dolev-Yao analysis shows plain Certificate Transparency requires an honest log, SCT Auditing removes that assumption, and Gossiping does not.

The paper analyzes accountability in Certificate Transparency and its SCT Auditing and Gossiping extensions in the Dolev-Yao model, starting from a vanilla PKI. It finds plain CT provides accountability only under the assumption of an honest log. The SCT Auditing extension can eliminate that assumption, while the Gossiping extension cannot. CT is supported by all major browsers and obliges Certificate Authorities to record issued certificates in public, monitored logs.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch