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cybersecurity

179 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

LongPIBench: A Long-Context Benchmark for Prompt Injection

Prompt injection attacks pose a serious security risk to large language models in real-world applications. However, existing prompt injection benchmarks primarily focus on short-context inputs, leaving the attacks and defenses in long-context settings largely unexplored. This gap leads to a substantial overestimation of the effectiveness of current defenses. In this paper, we bridge the gap by introducing LongPIBench, a long-context benchmark for prompt injection covering 4 realistic application scenarios: paper peer review, resume screening, code review, and email summary. For each scenario, we construct a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset, with context lengths ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of tokens. The evaluation results on LongPIBench reveal significant vulnerabilities of prompt injection defenses under long-context settings: even simple heuristic prompt injection attacks achieve high success rates and frequently bypass state-of-the-art defenses. We hope LongPIBench can serve as a practical benchmark for systematically evaluating prompt injection defenses in realistic long-context scenarios.

Yupei Liu, Yuqi Jia, Neil Zhenqiang Gong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Layered LLM Defenses as an Ensemble: Access Tiers, Inference Cost, and the Measured Failure Correlation Between Defense Layers

Practitioners defend large language models (LLMs) by stacking defenses, assuming the layers compound. A stack is an ensemble, and ensembles compound only under a condition the LLM security literature recommends but never measures: the members must fail on different inputs. Two instruments make that measurable. The Adversary Access-Tier Model (AATM) grades an adversary by the access it holds, from system-only (A0) to influence over training data (A4). A cost model sorts defenses into five classes of inference-time overhead; because two classes require training weights or reading activations, they tier the defender as AATM tiers the adversary. From these we derive how a stack behaves, and the quantities a defender cares about diverge: coverage saturates within a tier, cost rises by class, false refusals accumulate as a union, and residual attack success falls multiplicatively only under independence. We measure that independence. Running one adaptive adversary against a seven-layer stack, failure correlation is positive in all fifteen measurable pairs ($\phi$ from $0.30$ to $0.75$), and the joint residual exceeds the multiplicative prediction by up to $0.172$. Stratifying on behavior difficulty dissolves most of the association, so the dependence is predominantly common-cause, but it survives permutation inference, majority-vote grader labels, and externally calibrated thresholds. The same stack refuses four in five benign prompts while remaining statistically indistinguishable from its strongest single layer. The dependence is architectural rather than sampling-based: members correlate through the model they all wrap, so no wider member pool weakens it. Diversity therefore selects stack members but does not predict what an assembled stack delivers, which has to be measured end to end.

Abrar Alotaibi, Muhammad Shahid Jabbar, Sadam Al-Azani et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Compared to What? A Human-Anchored Security Benchmark for LLM-Generated Infrastructure-as-Code

Large language models are increasingly used to author Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), where a single insecure default can be deployed directly into production. Prior evaluations report raw vulnerability counts for model-generated IaC, but without a human baseline they cannot determine whether models are actually worse than engineers. We introduce GenIaC-SecBench, a benchmark of 100 deployment scenarios stratified by architectural complexity, evaluated across 12 model configurations from four vendors, producing 1,196 IaC artifacts scanned by three independent policy engines (Checkov, Trivy, KICS). Critically, we also scan 634 human-authored IaC templates with the same toolchain, providing the first size-matched human security baseline. Vulnerability density is strongly inverse to artifact size (Spearman $\rho = -0.55$, $p<10^{-77}$), meaning unmatched comparisons measure size rather than security. When matched on declared-resource count, all model configurations fall within 3.21x--3.87x the human vulnerability density, with the gap widening for simpler tasks (4.9x at one resource, 1.4x at twenty or more). We decompose reasoning into standard generation, prompt-engineered chain-of-thought, and vendor extended-thinking APIs. Vendor extended thinking significantly outperforms prompted chain-of-thought ($-12.0\%$, $p = 0.0013$), while prompted chain-of-thought is indistinguishable from standard generation ($-1.3\%$, n.s.). Token instrumentation shows extended thinking uses under 1\% of the output budget, explaining its bounded effect. Two negative results also emerge: deployability does not correlate with vulnerability ($r = 0.158$, $p = 0.625$), and classical complete-case Friedman testing is infeasible for realistic benchmark designs, motivating the Skillings-Mack statistic. All code, data, and regeneration scripts are released.

Animesh Shaw · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

CAITLYN: Can LLM Agents Autonomously Synthesize Defenses against Emerging Injection Attacks?

Prompt injection attacks on Large Language Model (LLM) agents seek to introduce malicious instructions or content into external text sources retrieved by agents, forcing the underlying LLMs to execute harmful actions outside their benign scope. While current defenses effectively counter known injection attacks, deploying them in LLM agent environments remains challenging due to attack variants and emerging threats. Moreover, existing solutions typically suffer from an inherent trilemma, i.e., a constant trade-off among runtime efficiency, contextual precision, and adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose Continuous Agents for Injection Threats via Lifelong Yielding Nexus (CAITLYN), an agent-agnostic defense middleware. CAITLYN integrates two systems. System I focuses on immediate defense against existing attacks using a two-tiered library: Tier-0 for rule-based detection scripts and Tier-1 for optimized LLM-based accurate inference. System II, in contrast, is deployed to monitor potential abnormal signals and attempt to synthesize new defenses. On standard benchmarks, CAITLYN matches the detection performance of state-of-the-art defenses at lower token overhead than LLM-as-a-judge baselines. On Emerging, our new delivery-aware benchmark featuring novel injection techniques, static baselines and the standalone System I configuration remain vulnerable. In contrast, System II autonomously synthesizes verified defense capabilities, substantially lowering the attack success rate across three diverse agent environments.

Zi Liang, XiaoYu Xu, Yanyun Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Not to Break, but to Attest: Adversarial Probes for Privacy-Preserving LLM Verification

A privacy-preserving zk-SNARK-based audit framework that searches for probes designed in the spirit of adversarial examples to amplify logit drift between an approved model and a modified deployment and demonstrates that token-based probes consistently deliver the strongest mean sensitivity across models and GPU platforms, although operating in a black-box setting.

Cameron Wilding, Mina Shaker, Fatemeh Ganji · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

FISGuard: Defending Against Membership Inference via Fixed Input Subspaces

As large language models are increasingly adopted in federated learning, protecting user privacy while performing parameter-efficient fine-tuning on distributed private data has become an important challenge. Although clients only share gradients instead of directly uploading raw data, the shared gradients may still leak membership information about training samples. ProjRes (S&P, 2026) further increases this risk: with less information and without accessing model outputs, an attacker can effectively distinguish members from non-members solely based on the projection residual between a candidate representation and the subspace induced by server-observable gradients. Existing defenses against membership inference mostly rely on gradient perturbation or regularization, which can not only degrade model utility but also fail to effectively defend against the membership inference attack introduced by ProjRes, which exploits the geometric structure of gradients. To address this issue, we propose FISGuard, a lightweight defense. Its key idea is to construct and fix a low-dimensional representation subspace using independent public data, thereby restricting the space through which private representations are exposed via gradients while preserving the primary information required for downstream tasks. This substantially reduces the projection-residual discrepancy between members and non-members. We evaluate FISGuard against five representative defense methods across three NLP datasets, two LLMs, and two fine-tuning strategies, Adapter and LoRA. The results show that FISGuard reduces the ProjRes attack AUC to near the random-guessing level of 0.5 in most settings, while maintaining downstream task performance close to that of the undefended model and introducing only limited computational overhead, thereby achieving a favorable privacy--utility trade-off.

Hao-Cheng Jiang, Hua Shen · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

ContextLeak: Exfiltrating LLM Agent Context via Malicious Tools

Exfiltrating an LLM agent's runtime context -- such as the user prompt, execution trajectory, and tool list -- poses severe security and privacy risks to users. Such attacks can be carried out via malicious tools and typically require three conditions: (1) the agent selects the malicious tool for task execution, (2) the agent passes its runtime context as input arguments to the tool, and (3) the tool's implementation transmits these inputs to an attacker-controlled endpoint. Existing work primarily focuses on conditions (1) and (3), leaving condition (2) largely unexplored, despite its critical role in enabling successful context exfiltration. In this work, we bridge this gap by developing ContextLeak, a malicious tool attack that induces the agent to both select the tool and disclose its context as input arguments. We realize this attack by carefully crafting the tool's name and description using reinforcement learning. Specifically, ContextLeak employs an LLM, referred to as the attack LLM, to automatically generate the malicious tool's name and description. To improve attack effectiveness, we fine-tune the attack LLM via reinforcement learning on a set of shadow users with diverse, simulated agent contexts. Our key technical contribution is the design of novel reward functions tailored to the context exfiltration objective, enabling effective reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning of the attack LLM. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our attack remains highly effective even when the shadow users' contexts differ substantially from those of the victim users. Moreover, ContextLeak significantly outperforms existing malicious tool attacks when adapted to this setting.

Yuqi Jia, Ruiqi Wang, Patrick Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Quantization-Triggered Backdoors in Language Models: Cross-Quantizer Transferability and the Validation--Deployment Gap

It is demonstrated that source-precision auditing alone does not rule out quantization-triggered behavior and that the final deployed configuration must be included in behavioral certification for trustworthy edge AI.

Jacopo Dardini, Claudio Stanzione, G. Colò et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Jul 2026

From Adoption to Deployment: A Qualitative Study on AI Integration in Software Development Practice

The goal of this study is to understand practitioners'decision making process and security considerations in selecting and integrating AI components through an exploratory semi-structured interview study, and distill the findings into actionable recommendations for AI adopters, model providers, and researchers.

Mahzabin Tamanna, Elizabeth Lin, Sparsha Gowda et al. · 0 citations

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