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.
AWS puts AI vulnerability detection to the test, and false positives pile up
AWS publicly released its Deception Benchmark (14,822 samples) showing leading AI models falsely flag 41-99% of safe code as vulnerable.
AWS released its Deception Benchmark publicly, containing 14,822 samples across 16 programming languages and more than 70 CWE categories, with 9,695 scored samples split into 6,988 code-level and 2,707 environment-gated challenges. AWS evaluated 12 models from five providers using single-turn prompts and found none met its production bar of below 10% for both false-positive and false-negative rates. With direct prompting, models caught nearly all real vulnerabilities but incorrectly flagged 41% to 99% of safe code, with precision between 52% and 71%. Asking models to prove exploitability reduced false positives by 17 to 74 percentage points but raised false-negative rates to 7-44%, with models struggling most when external controls like Kubernetes Network Policies blocked apparent exploits.
Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning
Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.
The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.
Why prevention-first secrets security will define enterprise scale: Learnings from a leading telecom
Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation
Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.
Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.