ZeroHour

Search: “code-repair”

30 stories

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

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 · 13d agoAI research1

ExecCritic: Learn to Test, Test to Improve for Coding Agents

ExecCritic separates test generation from patching for coding agents, lifting SWE-bench Verified resolution to 72.6%.

ExecCritic pairs a test-verify-revise scaffold with role-specific reinforcement learning: a Test agent writes repository-native tests and a Repair agent fixes code from execution feedback, both using Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B backbones. Post-trained Qwen agents compose to 72.6% on SWE-bench Verified, an 11.4-point gain over the 61.2% no-test baseline, without stronger-model or oracle feedback at evaluation time. The work shows test quality is the key variable: base-agent tests lowered resolution to 57.3% while GPT-5.6-sol tests raised it to 65.3%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

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 · 7d agoAI research1

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

I'm going back to coding by hand

A developer abandoned six months of Claude-assisted work on a popular app, resuming hand coding after losing track of what AI-generated changes did.

In a Hacker News post, a developer of an app with a solid user base describes abandoning a six-month Claude-assisted rewrite because they no longer understood what the AI-generated code changed or broke. The author notes their workplace already writes code exclusively with LLMs and says returning to hand coding restored understanding and motivation. The post advises others feeling detached from their craft to stop using AI coding assistants for a few days.

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

Emacs arbitrary code execution: incomplete fix for CVE-2024-53920

Incomplete fix for Emacs CVE-2024-53920 allows arbitrary code execution when viewing or editing untrusted files in non-Lisp modes like Perl flymake.

Bas Alberts of GitHub Security Lab discovered that the patch for CVE-2024-53920, an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs, was incomplete. Code execution remains possible when viewing or editing untrusted text files in modes other than Emacs Lisp mode, for example Perl files with flymake mode enabled. All Emacs versions affected by the original CVE remain affected by the incomplete fix.

oss-security · 2d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2024-53920

Adversarial Testing of Automated Program Repair Agents for Security Vulnerabilities

SWEADV benchmark shows adversarial issue descriptions make LLM program-repair agents write insecure fixes in 51.7% of cases, evading most detection tools.

Researchers built SWEADV, a benchmark of 750 adversarial issue descriptions derived from 150 SWE-bench Verified repair tasks, covering command execution, deserialization, path traversal, denial of service, and weak hashing attack types. Tested on mini_swe agents backed by GPT-5-Mini, MiniMax-M2.5, and DeepSeek-R, adversarial descriptions induced malicious behavior with successful repair in 51.7% of cases. Detection was weak: LLM-as-judge pre-repair screening reached only 62.3% accuracy, and post-repair detection via static analysis and LLM-as-judge achieved just 39.4% and 55.4%.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security1

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

Re: pcre2 version 10.48 released with security fixes

PCRE2 10.48 released with security fixes; seven vulnerabilities assigned CVEs including CVE-2026-86145 and CVE-2026-89156 through CVE-2026-89162.

The PCRE2 regular expression library released version 10.48 with multiple security fixes, disclosed on the oss-security mailing list. Seven issues received CVE assignments: CVE-2026-86145, CVE-2026-89156, CVE-2026-89157, CVE-2026-89158, CVE-2026-89160, CVE-2026-89161, and CVE-2026-89162. PCRE2 is a widely used regex engine embedded in many open-source projects and applications. No exploitation is reported in the disclosure.

Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

Hacker News users debate coding without LLMs, with one developer fired for refusing AI tools and others describing daily hand-coding practice to counter skill atrophy.

An Ask HN thread collects experiences of developers who still write code without LLM assistance. One contributor says he was fired for political reasons after refusing to use LLMs despite adequate stated performance, and observes fewer job ads now require LLM use. Others describe starting each day with a LeetCode problem or 30-60 minutes of hand-coding to stay sharp, contractual bans on AI-generated code for a government-adjacent embedded product over unresolved copyright issues, and inconsistent corporate policies where ChatGPT or Codex use flip-flops between allowed and blocked while a CIO mandates 70-80% AI-generated code next year.

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.

Can your coding style predict whether your code is vulnerable?

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth researchers present VulStyle, a stylometry-based vulnerability detector that also exposes benchmark reliability problems.

VulStyle combines stylometric features with syntax-tree structure and source tokens, pre-trained on about 4.9 million functions across seven programming languages and fine-tuned on five vulnerability detection datasets. It beat token-only detectors on some benchmarks but its F1 drops sharply on DiverseVul, which the authors link to noisy labels inflating reported performance across popular datasets. The authors argue style-aware detection should be harder to evade but did not test this empirically, and they note that uniform LLM-generated code may strip away the individual developer style the model depends on.

Help Net Security · 23d agoResearch1

USN-8736-1: Perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8736-1 fixing two Perl regex flaws that could cause denial of service, code execution, or security-restriction bypass.

Ubuntu released a security notice addressing two Perl vulnerabilities in regular expression handling. CVE-2026-15534 involves mishandling of large inputs during regex matching, enabling out-of-bounds heap reads or writes that could lead to denial of service or arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-19487 involves incorrect matching for regexes with alternative branches, allowing security restrictions to be bypassed. Users are advised to apply the updated packages.

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 · 11d agoResearch

Wireshark 4.6.8 patches 28 security bugs, nine in file parsers

Wireshark 4.6.8 fixes 28 security bugs, including nine crash-prone capture file parsers, misdecoded 5G fields, and memory-safety issues.

Wireshark 4.6.8 fixes 28 security bugs spanning advisories wnpa-sec-2026-64 through wnpa-sec-2026-91, including nine crash bugs in file parsers such as pcapng, Endace ERF and Tektronix K12xx that trigger when opening capture files. Fixes cover dissectors for RDP, SSH, Kerberos, H.245, CMS, C12.22 and several Bluetooth protocols, plus unnumbered memory-safety issues like a stack buffer overflow in the K12/RF5 writer. The release also corrects eight misdecoded 5G NAS/5GSM fields and moves the Unix extcap path to /usr/libexec/wireshark/extcap.

Help Net Security · Aug 13, 2026Advisory

USN-8733-1: Gzip vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8733-1 fixing two Gzip flaws: insecure gzexe temp files allowing file overwrites, and a crafted-file DoS/info exposure bug.

USN-8733-1 updates Gzip in Ubuntu to fix CVE-2026-41991, where the gzexe utility created temporary files insecurely when mktemp was unavailable, letting a local attacker overwrite arbitrary files. It also fixes CVE-2026-41992, incorrect handling of certain compressed files that could expose sensitive information or crash Gzip in a denial of service. Both issues have local impact and are addressed via updated Ubuntu packages.

Version Control DFIR: a Cheatsheet to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps

Wiz published a DFIR cheatsheet covering log visibility, incident readiness, and threat hunting across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.

Wiz researchers released a practitioner's guide to version control system forensics, incident response, and threat hunting. The cheatsheet maps log sources, audit capabilities, and hunting workflows across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. It aims to improve incident readiness for source code and CI/CD compromise scenarios.

Wiz Blog · 20d agoResearch1

PostgreSQL Fixes 12-Year-Old Logical Decoding Flaw Enabling Replication-Role Code Execution

PostgreSQL fixed CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a 12-year-old logical decoding flaw letting replication-role accounts execute arbitrary code as the database OS user.

PostgreSQL patched CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a flaw present since logical decoding shipped in 9.4 (2014) that lets an account with the REPLICATION attribute run arbitrary code as the database server's OS user when wal_level is logical. Versions before 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are affected; exploitation requires such an account, which backup, CDC, and monitoring tooling routinely holds. The fix adds an output_plugin_libraries whitelist, so administrators using non-default plugins such as wal2json and decoderbufs must add them and reload configuration after updating. Cyera Research, whose write-up names the flaw PostGREShell, demonstrated escalating a replication user to superuser with persistence; no PoC or KEV entry existed as of September 4.

The Hacker News · 12d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-64711

IntentFuzz: A Protocol-Aware Fuzzer for Automated Invariant Violation Detection in Intent-Based Cross-Chain Bridges

IntentFuzz protocol-aware fuzzer recovers bridge structure from unannotated Solidity and confirmed 22 invariant violations across 24 real-world deployments.

IntentFuzz formalizes a taxonomy separating invariant violations from settlement exposures in intent-based cross-chain bridges, then recovers a bridge's intent structure and deposit/fill function roles from unannotated Solidity source. It classified deposit and fill functions with 100% recall and 82% combined precision, and achieved 100% recall and precision on 23 planted-bug mutants. Across 24 real-world deployments it confirmed 17 genuine invariant violations with heuristic-only input generation, rising to 22 with its LLM-assisted tier, spanning eight vulnerable GitHub repositories with findings reproducible against public deployed bytecode.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

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 · 1d 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

How Developers Prevent Production Risk at the Source

Wiz argues shift-left code-stage security cuts remediation costs and ships Wiz Code, WizOS, and WizCLI to catch flaws pre-deployment.

A Wiz blog post argues that fixing vulnerabilities at the code stage costs a fraction of production remediation, citing the node:20-slim base image which ships 14 known CVEs, three of them critical. It claims AI agents can now analyze open-source commits and generate working exploits in minutes, shrinking the window between a public fix and automated attacks. The post promotes WizOS near-zero-CVE base images, WizCLI and MCP-server checks inside developer and AI agent sessions, and Wiz Code scanning across pull requests, repositories, and pipelines covering SAST, SCA, secrets, and IaC misconfigurations.

Wiz Blog · 13d agoIndustry1

USN-8675-2: Perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8675-2 fixing two Perl flaws (CVE-2026-12087, CVE-2026-13221) enabling information disclosure and regex-based security bypass on 26.04 LTS.

Ubuntu released USN-8675-2, extending the fixes from USN-8675-1 to Perl packages on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The update addresses CVE-2026-12087, an out-of-bounds heap read in the Socket module when handling short source addresses, which could lead to information disclosure. It also fixes CVE-2026-13221, where regular expressions containing many fixed string alternatives could produce incorrect matches and bypass security restrictions. No exploitation is reported in the notice.

Root-Cause Attribution Is a Search Problem: Continual Search for Long-Horizon Agent Failures

Continual Search framework iteratively prompts LLM judges to keep searching agent execution logs, boosting long-horizon failure root-cause attribution accuracy.

The paper frames automated root-cause attribution (RCA) for long-horizon AI agent failures as a search problem, since relevant evidence is sparse and distributed across massive execution traces. The authors propose Continual Search, an iterative framework that nudges an LLM judge across successive turns to keep hunting unresolved diagnostic evidence instead of settling on an early plausible diagnosis. They introduce MegaRCA-Mix, a benchmark of 50 human-annotated failure trials on long-horizon, execution-heavy tasks. On MegaRCA-Mix, Continual Search improves GPT-5.5's F1 from 0.349 to 0.498 (over 40% gain), and lower-tier models can surpass higher-tier counterparts when search is effective.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research1

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 · 11d agoVulnerability

Forgejo 16.0.4 has a critical security bug fix (RCE - Remote Code Execution)

Forgejo 16.0.4 fixes a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the self-hosted Git forge; administrators should update promptly.

The Forgejo project released version 16.0.4 of its self-hosted Git forge with a fix for a critical remote code execution vulnerability, as stated in the published release notes. The announcement provides no CVE identifier or technical exploitation details in the indexed text. Administrators running Forgejo instances should upgrade to 16.0.4 to apply the security fix.

Lobsters · security · 5d agoVulnerability1