Skip to content

303 results for “ROP”

What you seeeverything
  1. StreamClarify: Proactive Clarification for Grounded Streaming Video Question Answering

    StreamClarify is a training-free framework for grounded streaming video question answering. It uses the entropy of a binary pre-answer judgment to decide whether to answer or ask for clarification, and pairs this with a temporal-pyramid KV cache and a CPU-side semantic retrieval archive. The authors build StreamClarify-QA (1,837 QA pairs from StreamBench and OVO-Bench). Macro accuracy rises by up to 8.2 points across three VLM backbones.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  2. CivicBench: A Benchmark and Memory Framework for Web-Based Civic Data Analytics

    CivicBench is a 400-task benchmark over four cities and two years that freezes civic Web data (service requests, boundaries, weather, demographics) into reproducible bundles. Executable contracts score computation, source linkage, coverage, scope, qualified answers and refusal. The paper also proposes Task-State Memory (TSM), which compiles tool observations into typed assertions and reconciles records only within compatible scopes. Eight of nine model pairs show positive mean-score gains with bootstrap intervals excluding zero.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  3. Side-Channel Attack Prevention for Post Quantum Cryptography Algorithms: A 3D-Shield Approach

    The paper proposes a 3D-integration defense against side-channel attacks on post-quantum cryptography implementations. It uses decoy keys and physical shielding through chip stacking, and moves Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) computation to dedicated chips, complementing masking and shuffling. The authors validate it against a generic attack on intermediate values inside an NTT butterfly. It covers ML-KEM, ML-DSA, FN-DSA and SLH-DSA.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  4. What Does a Safety Label Measure? Auditing Situational-Safety Benchmarks for Multimodal LLMs

    The paper audits six situational-safety benchmarks for multimodal LLMs and proposes the Benchmark Card, seven measured fields that show whether a SAFE/UNSAFE label score comes from the scene, the request or the benchmark files. MSSBench chat leaks its label through image size, which alone reaches 82.3% accuracy. The Spot-Stop decomposition splits ranking-versus-labelling gaps across fourteen open MLLMs, and label-free recentering improves ranking on VSCBench for 13 of 14 models.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  5. AgentCap: Capability-Based Runtime Authorization for Secure LLM Agent Execution

    AgentCap is a runtime authorization layer for LLM agents from Virginia Tech (Suresh and Gao), posted to arXiv on 31 October 2026. The model proposes MCP tool calls, and a policy engine issues Ed25519-signed capability tokens only after checks on provenance, intent, trust and prerequisites. It reports 0% attack success with GPT-5.4 on AgentDojo and InjecAgent, but only on scenarios the authors built.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  6. The Long Con on the Web: Earn-then-Exploit Fraud Attacks against Coding Agents

    EtE (Earn-then-Exploit) is a web fraud attack framework against coding agents: a malicious site first gives several rounds of verifiable help to build trust, then issues task-related instructions that cross operational boundaries. Across 56 environments and three agents, average attack success was 71.4% (85.7% on Codex with GPT-5.5), beating injection baselines. The proposed defense, action-authorization separation (AAS), cut success to 0% with 100% task completion.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  7. Beyond Sensitive APIs: Detecting Access Control Flaws at Sensitive Callsites in Android Firmware

    Callix is a static analysis system that finds access control flaws at sensitive callsites in pre-installed Android apps, including generic APIs such as database reads that become sensitive when they touch protected data. It recovers each security check on a path as an explicit security property and uses a "restriction context" to judge whether the checks suffice. On 1,750 apps from 10 vendors it found 819 vulnerable paths, 42.1% allowing private user data access through generic database operations, with 95.1% precision on a 60% manual sample.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  8. Your Benchmark Is an Empirical Measure Over Difficulty

    The paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  9. Locality-Controlled Out-of-Distribution Guidance for Robust Regulatory DNA Sequence Design

    LOCOGEN is a sampling-time guidance method for diffusion models that design regulatory DNA sequences. It learns an invariant motif mask through sequence-level invariance learning, protects motif positions, and applies out-of-distribution damping only to background positions, with no retraining of the frozen backbone. On HepG2, K562 and SK-N-SH it reaches a region of the property, novelty and plausibility space that no baseline reached. Code is released.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  10. A Failure Mode Taxonomy and Severity Model for Ethereum Smart Contracts

    A failure mode taxonomy and severity model for Ethereum smart contracts, by Fernando Richter Vidal, Naghmeh Ivaki and Nuno Laranjeiro (University of Coimbra). It classifies observable malfunctions rather than vulnerabilities, using root cause, violated security property, impact, affected component and nature (irreversible, transient or permanent). It was built in five iterations and checked against 94 OpenSCV entries and post-cutoff incidents. The CIPER severity model ranks failures.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  11. On the Fundamental Limits of Prefill-Based Decoding Length Prediction

    This paper derives bounds on predicting an LLM's decode length from prefill-phase hidden states, a primitive for inference scheduling. It models decoding as a stopped stochastic process, giving per-prompt normality and an affine variance law σ=αμ+b. Predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, Mixture-of-Experts) converge near the bound, so system error dominates model error. It proposes fixing model, data and sampling in benchmarks and reporting relative-error metrics.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  12. Don't Lose the Thread: Empowering Long-Horizon LLM Agents with Cognitive Resource Self-Allocation

    CORAL (Cognitive Resource Self-Allocation) is an agent-callable working-memory toolset that lets an LLM agent checkpoint task progress and verified facts, then reset its cluttered context and resume from a clean state. A Multi-episode Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization algorithm trains the checkpointing. With an 8B model it reaches 42.8% average accuracy on GAIA, uses 6-7x fewer input tokens than a ReAct agent, and adds 8.0 points to a proprietary agent on BrowseComp.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  13. A Unified Hessian-Guided Framework for Post-Training Quantization

    This preprint proposes a unified post-training quantization framework for large language models. It derives a Hessian-guided approximation of the output change caused by joint weight and activation quantization, using a tractable Fisher approximation. Quantization ranges, linear transformations and weight rounding are optimized together under one output-sensitivity objective. The authors report gains over state-of-the-art transformation and rounding methods in channel-wise and block-wise settings.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  14. A Quantitative Evaluation of Constant-Time Analysis Tools

    AutoBench-CT is a modular benchmark for constant-time analysis tools, with manually verified per-violation ground truth across 64 cryptographic tasks. It scores seven tools on operational performance, detection quality and usability. The authors explain why CT-grind (2010) is still the most used tool, list recurring limitations across tools, and propose a composite pipeline for stronger constant-time guarantees. Accepted at ACSAC 2026.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  15. Cryptanalysis and Enhancement of VTBSAE: Provably Secure Verifier-Based PAKE Protocols for the Industrial Internet of Things

    Cryptanalysis of VTBSAE, a verifier-based PAKE protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things, showing it fails to resist client impersonation after server compromise. The authors propose E-VTBSAEv1, which binds the client point E1 to fresh server randomness, and prove AKE security and forward secrecy in the random-oracle model under CDH. Raspberry Pi 4B tests show runtime comparable to VTBSAE with the same communication and storage overhead.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  16. Aligning Medical Vision Language Models at the Capability Boundary with Entropy Adaptive Rubric Grounding

    MedCBR is a two-stage alignment framework for medical vision language models. Difficulty Weighted Boundary Preference Optimization (DBPO) trains on counterfactual preference pairs at the model's capability frontier. Entropy Gated Grounded Policy Optimization (EGPO) then applies distilled clinical rubrics according to prediction entropy. It reaches 61.2% average accuracy on six medical benchmarks, with the largest gains on differential diagnosis, and the two stages combine super-additively.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  17. AskStream: When and What to Ask Proactively under Uncertainty in Streaming Video Understanding

    AskStream is a multi-turn benchmark for streaming video understanding that adds a third proactive action, ask, alongside wait and answer, for cases where video or user information is incomplete. It has 438 videos, 2,714 manually annotated frame-level time windows (wait, ask, answer), four task categories and eight subtasks. The strongest model reaches only 52.18% on the proposed Ask-F1 metric, in both multiple-choice and open-ended settings.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  18. Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA)

    Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA) is a draft Standards Track ERC (created October 2026) by @MATOBOYCRYPTO65. It proposes structured human-readable metadata and semantic intent for transactions and UserOperations, an independent simulation and verification interface, and scoped, revocable capability tokens for privileged operations. It targets blind signing and frontend supply-chain attacks, citing the February 2025 Bybit Safe multisig theft. The page gives only the abstract, motivation and core concepts.

    ethresear.chpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  19. Beyond the Event Horizon of Keccak, Extending the Observation from 2011 and applications

    Beyond the Event Horizon of Keccak extends a 2011 observation that a path in the Keccak sponge from a zero-capacity state back to one yields infinite second-preimage families. Three theorems cover loops from any capacity value x, k-block loops and cycles, and Joux-style multicollisions with search cost independent of k. Verified examples run on Keccak-f[200] and Keccak-f[1600] with c=32; it also proposes bridge-based protocols.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  20. Multi-Token Prediction Done Right

    Soft Multi-Token Prediction (Soft-MTP) is a one-line change to multi-token prediction (MTP) pre-training. The authors show the MTP cross-entropy gradient splits exactly into a KL self-distillation term and a noisy residual, and a straight-through "KL gradient-recovery trick" keeps only the KL term. From 167M to 1.2B parameters it gives lower NTP perplexity, faster speculative decoding and higher zero-shot accuracy than standard MTP, with no added parameters or overhead.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  21. What Effort Level Should I Choose? On the Economics of Reasoning Effort in LLM Agents

    This paper treats LLM reasoning effort as a credence good and measures the counterfactual effect of effort levels on proprietary and open-weight models across four benchmarks, including long-horizon agentic tasks. Higher effort often fails on tasks lower effort solved, and on easy tasks the top level costs up to 42x the lowest. Starting at the lowest effort and escalating only after a verified failure matches or beats fixed top effort, usually at lower cost for proprietary models.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  22. Improving the Dependency on Fine-Tuning Data in Transfer Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition

    This paper proposes an fMLLR-based compensation mechanism that cuts the fine-tuning data needed in transfer learning for speech emotion recognition under train-test acoustic mismatch. An autoencoder reduces trainable parameters, and an affine transform in the encoder latent space models rotations and shifts. In a human-robot interaction task, mean CCC rose 16.8% with 12.9% of the training set and 14.4% with 50%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  23. Statistical Detection of Positional Bias in LLM-Based Recommender Systems: Methodologies and Empirical Evidence

    The paper proposes POB-ICM (contingency matrix with Chi-square independence testing) and POB-UNBP (a uniformity null model under permutation-based evaluation) to detect positional bias in top-1, single-turn LLM recommenders. On a RAG product-recommendation testbed with 2000 queries and 20 permutations each (40,000 instances), both methods reject positional independence in all evaluated models. Three metrics quantify the effect, and the bias persists across candidate-set size and temperature. Code is public.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  24. Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models

    Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models measures sycophancy in 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. It finds two behaviors with different origins: deference to a claim in the prompt exists in every base model, while capitulation under user objection is largely absent from base models and present in every post-trained checkpoint. Post-trained models often drop firmly held answers as readily as loosely held ones when the objection names an alternative.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  25. Tractable, Not Truncated: Colored-Noise TRNG Security via Fractional Brownian Motion

    This ePrint paper models oscillator-based TRNG phase noise, both white and flicker, as fractional Brownian motion. It proves a quasi-renewal property that gives closed-form worst-case min-entropy and sampling requirements, and extends spectral and Allan-variance analysis so noise parameters come from a single timing trace. FPGA and ASIC experiments show flicker noise accounts for over 99% of uncertainty at a 0.99 min-entropy target, allowing a bitrate two to three orders of magnitude higher.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  26. EnvSched: Environment-Aware Scheduling for Rollout-Efficient Agent Reinforcement Learning

    EnvSched is an online scheduler for agentic reinforcement learning that picks which environment-task pairs to roll out next. It builds a dual-relation graph over environments and tasks, propagates past rollout statistics to predict within-task reward variance, and adds environment quotas and a similarity penalty. On Qwen3-8B it scores 48.81 average on BFCL-v3, tau-Bench and ACEBench-Agent after 40 steps, above random selection at 120 steps.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  27. As the Story Unfolds: Watching a Film and Identifying Characters as a Human Does

    This paper defines a character naming task for films: given a name spoken in dialogue and its video context, the model must pick which visible character bears that name. It provides a dataset with annotations for character naming and first appearances, a video-and-dialogue model, and a comparison with proprietary multimodal LLMs. It also proposes a progressive framework that builds a character bank as the film plays, without cast lists or actor photographs.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  28. FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features

    FeatureArc is a benchmark for coding agents on evolving features, built by a pipeline that mines repository histories into multi-stage tasks across four programming languages. It has 73 manually reviewed tasks of 2 to 10 stages, validated with fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass tests. Across 10 agents, pooled success drops from 62.7% at the first stage to 28.5% for the whole feature. Inherited defects appear in 72.9% of failed later stages.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  29. Radical isogenies on every model

    Radical isogenies on every model is an IACR ePrint paper by Thomas Decru (October 2026). It gives radical isogeny steps of every odd degree N directly on short Weierstrass, Montgomery, twisted Edwards, Huff, Jacobi quartic, twisted Hessian, Legendre and Jacobi intersection curves, plus Kummer lines. In Tate normal form a step drops from 12.5N to 10N multiplications. Montgomery and twisted Edwards curves cost 10.5N+O(1) per step and 2N to push a point. All algorithms are inversion-free, with exact operation counts.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  30. DCKV: Learned Transform Coding of the Prompt KV Cache in Hybrid Language Models

    DCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  31. Falcon Key Recovery from Joint Sampler Leakages

    Falcon Key Recovery from Joint Sampler Leakages is an ePrint paper presenting a power side-channel attack on Falcon and FN-DSA that fuses three SamplerZ leakages (exponent class of the center, sign bit, proposal magnitude). It turns them into slab and halfspace constraints solved by softplus interval regression, with no LLL or BKZ. On PQClean Falcon-512 (ARM Cortex-M4) it recovered all 50 keys with at most 34 signatures; on c-fn-dsa it recovered 38 of 50 keys within 200 signatures.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  32. When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints

    "When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints" is an ePrint paper (2026/2654) arguing that DDGR hint classes and too-many-hints thresholds are not standalone side-channel security metrics. In synthetic Kyber-512 experiments, NTT-domain residues recover the full secret with about half the hints the uniform mod-q bound predicts. Finite-precision FFT samples need 25% to 55% of the budget for uniform perfect hints. No new attack optimizations are proposed.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  33. What Victims Take Away: Attack Reuse and Defense Revision after Prompt-Injection Attacks

    What Victims Take Away is an October 2026 arXiv paper analysing 563,349 Tensor Trust attack records to see how players reuse prompt injections they received. Within a week, targets reused 10.0% of attacks that broke their defense, versus 0.03% of matched attacks. Breaches were followed by defense changes that cut same-family attack success by 24.5 points. Received texts made up 23.2% of successful hijacks. The authors propose that AI security tools describe techniques without disclosing full attack text.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  34. Revisiting ZMAC+: Birthday-Bound Attacks and a Beyond-Birthday-Bound Repair

    ZMAC+ is a tweakable-block-cipher MAC (List and Nandi, ToSC 2017) with claimed beyond-birthday-bound security. This ePrint paper (2026/2647) shows a tag-swap attack: for two-block tags, a distinguisher and a fresh-message forgery with constant success probability using O(2^{n/2}) queries in the ideal-TBC model. It also corrects a counting error in the published Lemma 4 and proposes a repaired variant with an adaptive PRF bound of order q^2/2^{n+min(n,t)}.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  35. SymLift: Neural Semantic Lifting for Compile-Free Vulnerability Detection in Context-Incomplete Code Fragments

    SymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for context-incomplete code fragments. A fine-tuned LLM lifts control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations into a constrained LLVM-like IR. A parser turns the IR into facts, and Datalog rules derive findings with derivation traces. On Juliet function-level fragments Clang compilation success falls to 12.00%, while SymLift's completion rate drops only 1.17 points. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches Target-F1 94.41% on FormAI and 91.66% micro-F1 on MegaVul.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  36. The Policies of Programming Language Ecosystems: A "Qualitative" Analysis

    The Policies of Programming Language Ecosystems is an October 2026 arXiv paper (cs.SE) that compares the policies of eight programming language ecosystems, including CRAN for R, across 38 policy categories. Three authors coded the policies with moderate agreement. Malware, intellectual property and content removal are covered everywhere, while package size limits, metric manipulation, typosquatting and binary uploads diverge.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  37. Small Edits, Shifting Decisions: Benchmarking LLM Accuracy and Reliability on French Input Variants

    This paper builds a controlled French surface-variant benchmark with seven task types and 4,200 original-low-high triplets (12,600 inputs), covering missing apostrophes and diacritics and keyboard typos. Six models from two LLM families lose accuracy and show worse Brier score and NLL as perturbation grows. Keyboard typos hurt most. Calibration temperatures fitted on original inputs transfer to variants, and combining them with input restoration improves reliability further.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  38. What Transfers Across Protein Pockets? Experience Reuse in Molecular Optimization for Agentic Structure-Based Drug Design

    This paper studies experience reuse for LLM agents that optimize ligands in protein pockets by editing and docking. Using the full log of one agent run over CrossDocked2020 test-set pockets, it tests whether keys in an experience base recur on unseen pockets and separate improving from worsening edits. The separation is largely explained by molecule size change, action and round, not the target. The authors conclude a base may better prioritize an agent's own proposals for docking than prescribe what to build.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  39. Standing on Open Shoulders: Regional Fine-Tuning of Open-Weight Camera-Trap Models for UK Wildlife with Modest Data and Compute

    DeepFaune-UK is a fine-tune of the open DeepFaune camera-trap classifier on 28 UK classes, paired with MegaDetector v6. On 20,212 MammalWeb images it reached 88.8% strict accuracy against 56.5% (DeepFaune v1.5.0) and 59.0% (SpeciesNet). Re-applying the recipe to the DINOv3-based classifier gave 90.6%. Fine-tuning on about 150 crops per class matched full-data out-of-distribution accuracy, and a DINOv2 run took about 22 minutes on under 4 GB of GPU memory.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  40. When Agents Fail: Model or Harness--Who's to Blame?

    When Agents Fail: Model or Harness--Who's to Blame? proposes five measures for evaluating agent harnesses together with their underlying models: Valid Completion Rate, Model-Harness Fit, Cross-Model Fit, Interaction Residuals and Token Load. It tests four harnesses (OpenCode, Codex CLI, Pi CLI, DeepAgents) with four models on six benchmarks, across 111 settings and 52,168 trajectories. Harness rankings change by model and benchmark. OpenCode ranks first in cross-model performance.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  41. Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithms

    SOMA (Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithm) combines sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with the Muon optimizer for LLM training. It avoids SAM's extra gradient computation by using stale, purely stochastic gradient noise as the adversarial perturbation. The authors prove sample complexity does not depend on perturbation direction, study robustness to heavy-tailed gradient noise, and test SOMA against post-training quantization degradation and catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  42. For Thirty Pieces of Silver: Overcoming Non-IID via ZKP Sample-Level Auditing and Forcing Attackers into Traitors in Federated Learning

    Preprint (IACR ePrint 2026/2611) proposing a federated learning defense that replaces gradient detection with zero-knowledge-proof sample-level audits of client datasets. A staking mechanism forces attackers to train on discovered poisoned samples with flipped labels, producing counter-gradients that remove the backdoor without knowing the trigger. ZKP commitments lock the training data, which blocks adaptive attacks and gradient tampering. On CIFAR-10 under Dir(0.1) non-IID, it holds attack success rate below 6% against distributed backdoor and edge-case attacks.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  43. When to Stop Penalizing Actions? Martingale GRPO for VLA Reinforcement Learning

    MART-GRPO is a variant of group-relative policy optimization for vision-language-action (VLA) reinforcement learning. It uses a LoRA-fine-tuned VLM to find the last visible error without recovery in a failed rollout video, keeps failure feedback up to that point, and drops it afterward. Martingale stopping conditions show this preserves the expected GRPO gradient and can reduce covariance. With OpenVLA-OFT on RoboTwin 2.0, it raises success rates over full-trajectory GRPO across multiple tasks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  44. Tampered ML: Evaluating LLM Judgment of Machine Learning Research

    Tampered ML is a benchmark of 1,858 item-pairs, each pairing an experiment proposal reconstructed from a published ML paper with a minimally edited version that adds a targeted methodological flaw. Models must pick the sounder proposal in both presentation orders. A human study estimates 86% of items are valid (95% CI 81-91%). Opus 5 reaches 77.9% accuracy, and models are sensitive to order and favor flawed designs that look more specific, transparent, or conventional.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  45. Cache Engineering for Agents (AKV)

    AKV introduces cache engineering, which lets LLM agents control their active KV cache with drop (exclude cache from future attention) and repos (adjust retained keys' position encodings) without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The AKV serving engine keeps a stateless API while managing stateful cache reuse, eviction and restoration. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raised benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cut cost 27.7% versus threshold-triggered summarization.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  46. Causal Chain of Thought: Mitigating Attention Leakage via Context Isolation

    CausalCoT is an inference framework that splits a problem into a directed acyclic graph of atomic sub-questions and evaluates each node in an isolated context holding only its direct causal parents. This removes attention paths to non-parent content, so intermediate steps drive the answer rather than leaking from global context. It keeps benchmark accuracy competitive and raises causal sensitivity of reasoning steps by 12 points on average, up to 21, over the strongest baseline. The graph also allows test-time corrections that propagate downstream.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  47. F2G-Pose: Geometry-Aware Foundation Feature Lifting for Direct RGB-D Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

    F2G-Pose is a direct, single-pass framework that predicts category-level object pose, metric size and camera-frame completed shape from one RGB-D image. It lifts frozen RADIO foundation features onto partial point clouds, tokenizes local geometry with DGCNN, and fuses it with a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer. It trains only on synthetic SOPE data, leads on SOPE and ROPE at 28 FPS, and is tested on HouseCat6D, HANDAL and real manipulation.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  48. Rethinking Sequence Compression with Test-time Regression

    TTR-Compressor is a sequence compression method that treats input tokens as a test-time regression problem. The regression is learned end-to-end by backpropagation, and its coefficients are solved in closed form in the forward pass to give the compressed representation. As a block-wise sparse attention compressor it improves RULER over attention-based compressors by a large margin. As a visual token merger for multimodal LLMs it beats the MLP merger and matches it with 55.6% fewer visual tokens.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  49. Integer Coordinate Families and Threshold RSA Signatures for Any Prime Exponent

    Paper by Shivansh Jaiswal and Somitra Sanadhya (IACR ePrint 2026/2601) on integer coordinate families for threshold RSA signatures with prime exponent e. It shows the CT-RSA 2026 Ng-Lau scheme admits trivial forgeries and has a flawed proof. It proposes repaired scheme PiIC and integer secret-sharing scheme PiZ for any prime e and any (t,n), both proven TS-UF-CMA secure under the standard RSA assumption. It also gives super-polynomial coordinate lower bounds for pairwise families.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  50. Training Small Language Models for Transferable Tool Selection

    This paper trains small open language models with reinforcement learning to select tools for multi-step instructions over corpora of more than ten thousand tools. A Qwen3-8B model post-trained with the recipe outperforms Llama-4-Maverick (402B) on ToolBench. The trained model transfers to different retrievers and generalizes to new tool corpora in other domains, without relying on proprietary LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  51. Prompt Injection Through Forensic Evidence: A Taxonomy and Proof of Concept of Anti-Forensic Attacks on LLM-Assisted Digital Investigations

    Paper on prompt injection delivered through forensic evidence, where the seized device's contents are attacker-controlled and the examiner must read them. It extends the anti-forensic model to cover manipulation of the reasoning layer and gives a taxonomy (objective, technique, payload location, concealment). Three proof-of-concept attacks on an LLM-assisted analysis pipeline change a reported conclusion, write attacker-chosen content to the analyst workstation, and trigger outbound network traffic. Mitigations are proposed.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  52. Monitorability Is Trainable: Post-Training for Chain-of-Thought Monitorability

    Monitorability Is Trainable proposes an unsupervised post-training objective that maximizes mutual information between a model's chain of thought and its output. On three model organisms with degraded CoT (from compression, monitor optimization, and synthetic-document generalization), it recovers most or all lost monitorability. On undegraded policies it improves CoT monitor and activation probe prediction of unsafe behavior and raises consequential reasoning.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  53. Where AI Vulnerability Discovery Harnesses Go Quiet: Structural False Negatives and Hidden Vulnerabilities

    Paper (arXiv, 21 October 2026) on structural false negatives in LLM vulnerability discovery harnesses. Starting from Knostic's OpenAnt and raptor, then 10 more open-source harnesses, the authors map 13 points where code selection, filtering, and finding storage or merging drop vulnerabilities. One file was dropped by six harnesses before the model saw it, five without notice. It covers attacker evasion, content-steered verdicts, prompt injection, and design principles and tests.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  54. HAETAE on a Diet: Less Stack, Less Time on Low-End Microcontrollers

    This ePrint paper presents an optimized HAETAE implementation, a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme, for Cortex-M4, Cortex-M3, MSP430 and AVR. It keeps polynomials in 16 bits, shares buffers between objects with disjoint lifetimes, and replays Gaussian samples instead of regenerating them. On an ATmega2560, HAETAE-2 key generation, signing and verification run in 8,070 B of SRAM. Stack use drops up to 34% and signing is 1.18-2.51x faster than Low-Stack HAETAE.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  55. InterWebCoder: Learning Interactive Webpage Generation from Executable Tests via Reinforcement Learning

    InterWebCoder is a framework for interactive webpage code generation by multimodal LLMs. It synthesizes self-contained webpages with executable test scripts from recorded interaction trajectories, repairs failures using runtime evidence, then trains with test-ID-weighted SFT and GRPO using test pass rates and visual similarity as rewards. The pipeline yields 1,736 verified samples from 2,058 tasks. A 9B model scores 48.54 on IWR-Bench and 48.42 on Vision2Web, and reward latency drops over 97%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  56. Benchmarking Arabic Dialects for Math Problems

    DAR-MGSM (Dialectal Arabic Multilingual Grade School Math) is a manually curated benchmark for mathematical reasoning in Dialectal Arabic. It covers five major Arabic dialects plus Modern Standard Arabic, in a translated-only version and a translated and culturally localized version. Eleven Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs were tested: accuracy generally drops on the localized version, and a mechanistic interpretability analysis shows the two variants induce distinct internal reasoning trajectories.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  57. Cache Engineering for Agents

    Cache Engineering for Agents proposes letting LLM agents control their active KV cache directly, using a drop operation to exclude cache from attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings, without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The authors build the AKV serving engine to handle history-dependent cache states. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raises average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cuts cost by 27.7% against threshold-triggered summarization. AKV gives up to 1.2x output throughput and 1.5x faster P95 latency.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  58. OptScientist: Automated Discovery of Optimization Laws

    OptScientist is a framework that discovers compact symbolic optimization laws from data. It pairs a model that infers symbolic optimization problems with an LLM agentic system that uses literature priors, proposes candidate laws, abstracts mechanisms and suggests new data to collect. On OptFeynman, a new benchmark of 99 physics-derived problems, it recovers ground-truth laws for over 80%. It is also tested on human risky choice and central-bank monetary policy.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  59. Code2Video-Compass: A Comprehensive Benchmark for General-Purpose Code-Based Video Generation across T2V, I2V, and V2V

    Code2Video-Compass is a benchmark of 2,104 tasks for code-based video generation, where multimodal LLMs write executable programs that produce complete videos from text (T2V), image (I2V) or video (V2V) inputs. Tasks span 10 categories and 24 subtypes. Scoring uses 12 objective metrics and five MLLM-judge metrics. Across 15 proprietary and open-weight models from nine families, performance falls as construction, dynamic animation and state-dependency complexity rise.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  60. A Systematic Evaluation of Fault Attacks and Countermeasures on ML-DSA Rejection Sampling

    Systematic evaluation of fault attacks on ML-DSA (FIPS 204) rejection sampling and of proposed countermeasures. It proves the "third rejection test" of patent WO2025261784A1 re-verifies what check 2 already guarantees, and shows that 30,000 fault injections never detect a skipped z-norm check. The author fully recovers s1 against a third-check-protected implementation under randomized signing. Third check and sign-then-verify are complementary; overhead is 0.04–0.05% on x86-64 and 0.83% on Cortex-M4 for the third check.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  61. Reward Misspecification Degrades Chain-of-Thought Monitorability

    This paper shows that reward misspecification alone degrades chain-of-thought (CoT) monitorability in language models. Using a testbed of paired true and misspecified rewards across three models and three tasks, CoTs keep reasoning about task intent while outputs hack the reward. The proposed reward description training injects an LM-inferred reward description into the input and raises monitorability by an average of 24% or 42% absolute, depending on the metric.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  62. Graphs and cycles in curve-based collision walks

    Graphs and cycles in curve-based collision walks is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2560) on van Oorschot-Wiener style collision attacks in the multi-user setting. It covers elliptic curve discrete logarithms and isogeny pathfinding on supersingular F_p^2 and F_p curves, and proposes new pseudorandom walks. For F_p^2 curves, L keys need about L + log(L) useful collisions with no infiltrator. For F_p curves, about 0.75L keys fall to L collisions with an infiltrator.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  63. Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policy

    The paper introduces PhysRSI-eval, a five-axis metric for physical recursive self-improvement: first-attempt performance, efficiency, success, budget and improvement from failure. Several VLMs are tested on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. It proposes the Physical Barrel Hypothesis and studies observational scaling. Workspace interventions show that removing history lowers late-round success, while frozen workspaces still help on unseen layouts.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  64. Analysis of an AI based code distinguisher

    The paper analyses DeepDistinguisher, a transformer-like model that tells Goppa codes apart from random linear codes. Saliency maps and attention visualisation reveal a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly relies on. A pairwise-XOR rule inspired by minimum distance correlates strongly with the model's predictions, and the model loses most of its power on random matrices meeting both constraints. This suggests it exploits general combinatorial properties, not hidden algebraic structure.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  65. Analysis of an AI based code distinguisher

    Analysis of DeepDistinguisher, a transformer model that tells Goppa codes from random linear codes. Using saliency maps and attention visualization, the authors find a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly uses. They propose a pairwise-XOR rule on generator matrix rows that correlates strongly with the model's predictions. On random matrices meeting the minimum distance and XOR constraints, the model loses most of its accuracy, so it exploits general combinatorial properties rather than hidden algebraic structure.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  66. TokenGate: Adapting LLMs for Fast and Memory-Efficient Prefill with Learned Token Pruning

    TokenGate is a small drop-in component that adds end-to-end learnable token pruning to trained LLMs for long-context prefill. It uses token-gated attention, inspired by Mixture-of-Experts, to re-weight attention logits with token importance scores, which gets gradients through the non-differentiable top-K step. The authors report 1.4-11.3x faster time-to-first token and 1.5-3.4x lower peak memory with no accuracy loss, on Qwen3 and Qwen3.5.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  67. The Development of Sycophancy in Language Models: Tracing Vulnerabilities from Pretraining to Post-Training

    The paper traces sycophancy across 741 checkpoints from 30 open model lineages, from early pretraining to released models. It plants initial verdicts on moral scenarios and measures how far models follow a user's opinion or drop their answer under pressure. The behaviour usually exists before post-training, but which questions a released model yields on is set mainly during post-training. For Tülu-3 8B, its own preference-stage checkpoint removes 85% of remaining prediction error, a sibling model only 19%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  68. Blind-DLPA: An End-to-End Framework for Profiled Blind Side-Channel Analysis

    Blind-DLPA is a multi-task deep-learning framework for profiled blind side-channel analysis, where the attacker has labeled profiling traces but only leakage traces from the target, with no plaintexts or ciphertexts. It estimates Hamming-weight posteriors of an input and a key-dependent intermediate, then ranks key hypotheses against theoretical joint distributions. It recovers keys on unprotected AES and Kyber and on ASCAD (guessing entropy zero with 39 traces), and the authors report collisions in a prior Ascon Hamming-weight model.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  69. From if to Oops: Turning a conditional into a key-recovery oracle

    The paper presents a fault attack on deterministic CSIDH and OSIDH-LD. Forcing the lane-selection mask to zero (for example by skipping one instruction) makes output changes reveal whether a secret exponent reaches a threshold. Binary search then recovers the full key in at most 297 queries for OSIDH-LD and 222 for deterministic CSIDH with CSIDH-512-sized keys. Full OSIDH-LD keys were recovered in software fault simulation, and a ChipWhisperer-Lite skipped the target instruction with probability at least 0.94. The authors argue fault resistance requires giving up determinism and propose randomization countermeasures.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  70. How Effectively Do Security Skills Guide Coding Agents in Vulnerability Detection in Linux Kernel?

    The paper is a large-scale study of 37 security skills run through Claude Code with four LLMs on 100 real Linux kernel vulnerabilities, 14,800 runs in all. Only 24.4 percent of runs found the correct function and 15.7 percent classified the vulnerability correctly. It proposes SKILL-SIF, which evolves skills from failure patterns and raised fully correct detection on 100 unseen vulnerabilities from 2 to 16 percent.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  71. How Effectively Do Security Skills Guide Coding Agents in Vulnerability Detection in Linux Kernel?

    Empirical study of 37 security skills run through Claude Code with four LLMs on 100 real Linux kernel vulnerabilities across ten classes (14,800 runs). 24.4% of runs found the correct function, 18.3% the function and statement, and 15.7% the vulnerability class. The authors propose SKILL-SIF, which evolves skills from failures and raised fully correct detection on 100 unseen vulnerabilities from 2% to 16%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  72. How employment is changing at Anthropic

    "How employment is changing at Anthropic" is an October 2026 technical report by Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory. It uses internal employment, agent telemetry, output, survey, calendar and hiring data plus 17 interviews. Junior technical hiring fell from 27% to 9%, agent hours reached six times employee hours by August 2026, and adopters' output rose. Employees increasingly do meta-work managing agents.

    anthropic.compaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  73. The One-Pixel of Reasoning: One Truthful Relation Is Enough to Mislead LLM Agents

    The One-Pixel of Reasoning introduces the one-relation attack (ORA), which finds a critical implicit warrant linking evidence to a conclusion and inserts one source-grounded sentence that qualifies it, steering an LLM agent to a wrong belief. Across eighteen models on biomedical inference and vulnerability detection, best-of-10 attacks flip initially correct answers 54.9% of the time for proprietary models and 80.0% for open-weight models. Attacks transfer without victim feedback, can pass source-support checks, and multi-agent debate raises team error from 50.0% to 59.5%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  74. Post-Quantum Stateless Steganography & MTU Bounds: Bridging P2P Censorship Resistance to Quantum Networks

    Forum announcement of a Zenodo preprint on post-quantum migration for censorship-resistant P2P steganographic tunnels. It argues that ML-KEM's prime modulus (q=3329) makes naive bit-packed ciphertexts statistically distinguishable from uniform noise, which gives a cheap passive DPI distinguisher. It also argues that composite PQ 0-RTT envelopes over 4.4 KB force fragmentation, which requires stateful reassembly before AEAD verification and reopens memory-exhaustion DoS in eBPF/XDP filters. Proposed fixes are algebraic uniformization (LWR lattices or inverse rejection sampling), sub-MTU hybrid or pure-PQ envelopes (Falcon-512, signcryption), and Fujisaki–Okamoto implicit rejection for constant-time silent drops. Aimed at Ethereum validator, libp2p and RPC transports facing harvest-now-decrypt-later threats.

    ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  75. Superspecial points on Humbert surfaces and the probability of (N,N)-splitting

    Determines, to first order in 1/p with an explicit error bound, the proportion of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces over F_p-bar (p ≡ 3 mod 4) that are optimally (N,N)-split. The expected number of optimal splittings is exactly 5N·J_2(N)(p-1)/(p²+1), so the split proportion is about 5N·J_2(N)/p. This gives the stationary target density of the splitting-detection attack on the dimension-two superspecial isogeny problem, which was previously known only from experiments or a one-sided bound. The proofs use Siegel's mass formula and genus averages over refined Humbert invariants, and every formula was checked by exact computation at twelve primes.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  76. DPA-style Attacks on VOLE-in-the-Head Signature Schemes

    Presents the first DPA-style power side-channel attack framework against VOLE-in-the-Head signature schemes, targeting the secret witness whose recovery enables forging signatures on arbitrary messages. It analyzes leakage from sensitive intermediate values in VOLE correlations and proposes six attack classes (two vertical, four horizontal) on FAEST and SDitH, both in NIST's third round of additional signatures. Attacks are validated with simulated leakage under varying noise and real measurements on three ARM Cortex-M4 devices.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  77. DLite: History-free Speculative Decoding for Agentic AI

    DLite is a history-free speculative decoding framework for agentic LLM workloads. It reuses the target model's contextual hidden states and predicts locally without keeping the draft model's historical KV cache, which avoids the up to 80% acceptance-length drop seen with long, multi-turn contexts. A lightweight sequential head restores intra-block causal dependencies, and a two-stage training strategy is used. It reaches 2-6 acceptance length and beats DSpark by up to 70%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  78. GLOBE: Evolving Structured Agentic Memory for E-commerce Product Optimization in Generative Search

    GLOBE is an agentic framework that optimizes e-commerce product listings for generative search by storing strategies in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. An Editor applies behaviors and gets rank-based feedback, a Reflector turns it into updates, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, and a Curator commits changes. Harmful behaviors are deactivated. Structured behaviors beat monolithic prompt optimization and transfer to unseen product categories.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  79. On the possibilities and limitations of LLM-based multi-agent systems for multi-criteria decision-making in healthcare operations management

    This paper proposes a framework for auditing LLM-agent-generated stakeholder preferences before they are used as weights in multi-objective optimization for healthcare operations. Experiments on outpatient appointment scheduling and emergency department configurations show that explicit ratings vary by role and clinic conditions, deliberation can erase role differences, and pairwise choices depend largely on option order. Robust weighted-sum models often select different schedules than average weights.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  80. CHAMP: Cayley HAshing with Matrix Products

    CHAMP is a Cayley hash function that hashes binary strings by mapping each bit to a 2x2 matrix over a finite field and multiplying the matrices. The product's semigroup structure gives the hash homomorphic properties. The authors (Demin, Ovchinnikov, Shpilrain) discuss its collision resistance, implementation and performance. Cayley-style hashes have a history of structural attacks, so the security analysis is what a cryptographer would check.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  81. SwiftAuth: Conditional Privacy-Preserving UAV Authentication with Multi-Source Credential Aggregation and Non-Interactive Authorization

    The paper proposes a traceable and aggregatable tagged witness signature (TA-TWS) and builds SwiftAuth on it, a conditional privacy-preserving anonymous authentication framework for UAVs and other dynamic terminals. Issuers can create authorization components while users are offline. Several credentials compress into one constant-size proof, verifiers can batch-verify across users, and a regulatory trapdoor lets authorities trace misbehaving users. TA-TWS is proven unforgeable and witness-hiding, and benchmarks with the MIRACL Core library on constrained devices and Aliyun servers show it is practical.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  82. Shorter Hash-Based Signatures via Guarded Sharing in a DAG Model

    Proposes "guarded sharing", a technique that moves few-time signatures in SPHINCS-style stateless hash-based schemes from a tree model to a DAG model. Combined with bucket thinning, hash chains and rejection sampling, it yields BGS-CC, which improves on the prior best few-time scheme BPORS-C+BFP. For 128-bit security and a use quota of Q=2^24 it gives 2,228-byte signatures, the first SPHINCS-based stateless signature shorter than ML-DSA-44's 2,420 bytes. This matters for PQ migration because signature size is the main drawback of SLH-DSA.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  83. Rethinking Routing Exploration in Modern Mixture-of-Experts

    The paper identifies an "exploration dilemma" in modern Mixture-of-Experts models. Shared experts reduce the variability of token representations, which makes routing less exploratory. Fine-grained expert segmentation enlarges the combinatorial routing space and so needs more exploration, which means its extra expressiveness may go unrealized. It proposes MirrorMoE, which shrinks the exploration space by suppressing unnecessary experts per token, and reports consistent gains across model scales.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  84. Learning to Steer LLM Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

    Proposes a steering agent that supervises LLM agents and multi-agent systems during execution and corrects goal drift, where long-horizon tool use and inter-agent collaboration slowly diverge from the overall objective. A low-cost fast path decides when to intervene, and a high-cost slow path generates how to intervene. Both paths are trained jointly with reinforcement learning, combining a pairwise ranking objective with GRPO. On information-seeking search tasks it improves performance and efficiency for single-agent and multi-agent systems, generalizes out of domain, transfers to unseen executors, and allows intervention frequency to be adjusted without retraining.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  85. My Credentials, Please: Detecting Filesystem Capability Laundering in MCP Servers at Scale

    Studies "filesystem capability laundering" in MCP servers: client approval of a tool call grants the server process broad host filesystem access, so attacker-steered arguments can reach sensitive files outside the tool's declared contract. The authors build MCP-FSD, which infers per-tool least-privilege boundaries, plants credential fixtures outside them, and tests exploitability and sandbox containment by paired dynamic execution. Of 21,097 servers from nine registries, 16.4% of 4,806 triaged servers have filesystem capabilities despite non-filesystem classifications. Dynamic validation confirmed 150 vulnerable instances, and disclosure produced 13 advisories, including two CVEs in Anthropic's Git MCP Server.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  86. Knowledge That Is Linear Before Fine-Tuning Generalizes After It

    The paper separates "active" facts (which support generalization beyond recall) from "inert" ones. It builds new relations by relabeling answers of existing ones (Paris -> Europe becomes Paris -> crab), fine-tunes on a subset of subjects, and tests held-out subjects that share an answer (Munich -> crab). Across eleven language models and 70 relations, linear readability of the original relation in pretrained representations correlates with this generalization at Pearson r = 0.87 to 0.92 within each model. The result holds after controlling for fine-tuning set size, original-relation accuracy and subject frequency in pretraining text, and it survives re-randomized labels, seeds and thirteen other label categories. Mapping wrong labels back to the original answers shows the fine-tuned model's errors follow the linear probe's top answers.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  87. Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random Projection

    Proposes protecting the retrieval datastore in RAG systems by applying the same random projection to datastore embeddings and query embeddings. This provably preserves query-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets it beats prior differential-privacy-based methods on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attacks, making it a practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  88. Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random Projection

    Proposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  89. Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation for Unified Vision-Language Models

    Proposes SCOPED (Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation), which trains capability-specific RL experts for vision-language models. It extracts explicit skills from them through reward-guided reflection. During on-policy distillation the skills guide expert supervision but are hidden from the unified student, so the student internalizes the procedural knowledge and needs no explicit skills at inference. Across eight multimodal benchmarks it beats the backbone and mixed-capability RL. Analyses show cross-capability gradient interference in joint RL, and that skill augmentation gives more consistent expert trajectories, more attention to task-relevant visual evidence, and better preservation of expertise.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  90. Efficient KV Cache Migration for Geo-Distributed LLM Inference in Collaborative Edge Computing

    Proposes EdgeFlow, a hybrid KV cache migration scheme for distributed LLM inference across heterogeneous edge servers in Collaborative Edge Computing. It combines direct KV cache transmission with activation-based recomputation, overlapping computation and communication to cut migration time when servers disconnect or overload. The authors formulate a multi-node KV migration optimization problem and give a 2-approximation algorithm built on improved LP relaxation and bipartite graph techniques. Experiments on a real distributed LLM inference platform show up to 45% lower migration time.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  91. The importance of tensor handling and implementation of physics-informed DeepONets

    Proposes a modified Physics-informed DeepONet (PI-DeepONet) architecture that removes redundancy in how the Branch network processes input functions across collocation points. It is mathematically equivalent to the original but uses smaller input tensors and fewer Branch evaluations. The authors derive training-time scaling laws, then test on 1D, 2D and 3D linear advection problems. Accuracy matches the original, the maximum speed-up is 3.75× in 2D, and a 3D model trains on an NVIDIA A100 only with the new formulation, because the original runs out of memory.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  92. DropKV: Decoupling Residual-Output Perturbation for Near-Optimal KV-Cache Eviction

    DropKV is a KV-cache eviction framework for long-context LLMs. It decouples the joint eviction decision into independent per-token scores based on residual-output perturbation, which avoids the NP-hard combinatorial problem. It has a provable constant-factor approximation guarantee under a cone condition, which the authors verify empirically on three long-context LLMs. The fused Triton kernels never materialize the full attention matrix. They give a 19.8x scoring-kernel speedup and up to 9.9% end-to-end prefill speedup. On RULER and LongBench it beats state-of-the-art eviction baselines at equal cache budgets.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  93. SecAgg++: A Post-Quantum Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Protocol

    SecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that swaps in post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure built on secret sharing and additive masking. It matters because existing masking-based aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, so client model updates would be exposed to quantum-capable adversaries.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  94. SecAgg++: A Post-Quantum Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Protocol

    SecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that uses post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure. It matters because most masking-based secure aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, which leaves federated model updates exposed to future quantum adversaries.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  95. From Perception to Prediction and Intervention: Benchmarking Proactive Video Assistants in Real-Life Scenarios

    Introduces P^3IBench, a benchmark for proactive video understanding in real-life streaming scenarios, covering three capabilities: daily perception, risk prediction and intervention. It evaluates 12 open-source and proprietary video-language models (streaming and adapted non-streaming) and finds they struggle to make well-calibrated decisions about when to respond. The authors also build extra proactive training data and train P^3I-Assistant-4B, which improves several tasks unevenly, showing that proactive assistance needs response timing and restraint as well as visual understanding.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  96. Structural Cryptanalysis of the Eevee AEAD Family

    ePrint paper cryptanalysing Eevee (Umbreon, Jolteon, Espeon), forkcipher-based AEAD modes proposed at CCS 2023 for IoT-to-cloud computation. It gives a two-encryption AD-free prefix distinguisher, a four-encryption nonce-misuse distinguisher, a deterministic AD-only forgery, and nonce-respecting forgeries on Jolteon and Espeon (fresh one-block forgery reusing the tag; arbitrary AD substitution). It traces these to proof flaws (online-prefix consistency, domain separation, checksum freshness), derives design requirements, and concludes the failures are in the mode design, not the C implementation.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  97. Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored Defense

    The paper shows that symmetric aggregation of a primary reward (correctness) and auxiliary rewards (brevity, efficiency) in LLM post-training can raise aggregate reward while primary-task performance falls. It proves that deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained. It proposes Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which elects an anchor channel by policy drift and gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG reaches 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, and shortens responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training. Experiments on Qwen and Llama models cover math and program synthesis.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  98. Reaction Attack on CKKS Deployments with Asymptotically Optimal Query Complexity

    Shows a protocol-level reaction attack on CKKS homomorphic-encryption deployments that publish coefficient-to-slot (C2S) evaluation keys and let the client return a 1-bit validity response. A malicious evaluator shifts a public encryption key, uses the public C2S layer to repack it into a ciphertext whose validity depends on one secret coefficient, and recovers a ternary secret key with O(H) queries, within a factor 2/log2(3) of the entropy lower bound. Each query is re-randomized with a fresh encryption of zero to evade trivial detection. The authors implemented it end to end in Lattigo v6.2.0 and recovered full keys across four standard CKKS parameter sets. It does not break RLWE or CKKS IND-CPA security.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  99. Recursive Reward Improvement via Adversarial Meta-Prompt Evolution

    Introduces Recursive Reward Improvement (RRI) for recursive self-improvement on open-ended expert tasks without answer keys, where a proposer writes both a task and a rubric. Before the solver trains, an adversary writes a rubric-gaming but useless answer, the same model writes an honest answer without seeing the rubric, and up to two repair steps revise the rubric until the honest answer wins. Exploits found also rewrite future task and rubric generation. On HealthBench Professional it beats a Generation Only baseline by 10.9 points at 9B and 12.4 at 27B (10.3 with no external model), and the 27B model transfers to PRBench Hard (+6.6) and ProfBench (+8.0).

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  100. Harness^2: Recursive Agent Harnessing for an Open World

    Harness^2 is a plug-and-play framework that recursively improves LLM agent execution harnesses in open-world settings where no ground-truth verifiers exist. Task-level recursion uses a contrastive Propose-Probe-Compose step to guide harness edits for the current task, and it scales through parallel or sequential recursion. Harnessing-level recursion distills experience from those edits into a continual-improvement harness for future tasks. A single step improves GLM-5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash over their base harnesses by up to 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench, 4.5 on JobBench and 11.8 percentage points on LAB.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  101. Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing Agents

    Presents ChainGraph, a pattern that externalizes exploit-chain reasoning for LLM pentest agents (Claude Code, Codex) into a Neo4j property graph exposed via the Model Context Protocol. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges, queried with Cypher and Graph Data Science for next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, chain-severity promotion, provenance and chokepoints. On a synthetic GOAD-style multi-forest Active Directory engagement, three Medium findings become Critical once chained, betweenness centrality identifies break-points, and reasoning payload drops ~98% (token proxy); results are single-run and illustrative.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  102. Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing Agents

    ChainGraph is a pattern that moves exploit-chain reasoning out of the flat context window and into a Neo4j property graph. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges. The graph is wired to Claude Code or Codex through MCP with no custom harness. Five operator questions (next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, combined-severity promotion, evidence provenance, chokepoint identification) become reusable Cypher and Graph Data Science queries, plus a chain-severity score. On a synthetic multi-forest Active Directory lab modeled on GOAD, three findings rated Medium in isolation become Critical once their path to the forest root is materialized. Scoping each decision to a graph result cut the reasoning payload by about 98% on a token proxy. The authors say the results are illustrative single-run measurements, not a benchmark.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  103. A Hybrid BP-SAT Attack on MILENAGE: Combining the Complementary Strengths of Algebraic and Soft-Analytical Side-Channel Attacks

    ePrint paper evaluating ASCA (SAT-based) and SASCA (belief propagation) side-channel attacks on the AES-based MILENAGE authentication algorithm in USIM cards, using neural-network leakage predictions to recover subscriber key K and operator secret OPc from a single trace. SASCA alone succeeds in 87.7% of attacks but converges to a wrong OPc in 6.1%; ASCA succeeds in only 34% within a 1-hour timeout. The hybrid, where BP refines the predictions before they go to the SAT solver, reaches 93.8% with lower average runtime. It also proposes a countermeasure that masks each AES round key with an independent per-device secret, and the authors report it defeated the hybrid attack in all evaluated cases.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  104. Quantum-Aware Key Rank for Side-Channel Attacks evaluation

    Proposes a cost model and metric for an adversary who collects side-channel traces classically and finishes the key search on a quantum computer. Shows any quantum algorithm needs Omega(sqrt(r)) cipher evaluations for key rank r, and that the quadratic advantage holds only up to a rank bound set by the NIST MAXDEPTH budget (about 2^58.6 for AES-128 at D=2^40). Defines a quantum-aware key rank computable from existing rank estimators, with simulated-leakage experiments showing a depth-limited quantum adversary is worth about 22 traces at SNR 0.125.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  105. Post-Quantum Certificate-Based PSK Provisioning for WireGuard via Mutual TLS, DTLS, and QUIC: Design and Performance Study

    The paper proposes a post-quantum architecture for WireGuard that leaves the core protocol unchanged. A mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 control channel runs over TCP, UDP (DTLS) or QUIC and uses ML-KEM key establishment, with X.509 certificates from a PKI signed with ML-DSA. A shared secret derived from the session's exported keying material is injected into WireGuard's native PSK interface. A Tamarin model of the TLS–WireGuard composition layer checks secrecy, binding and provisioning-order properties and identifies the conditions needed for secure deployment. The authors benchmark handshake latency and CPU time for classical, pure-PQ and hybrid key establishment across the three transports, and compare against the Rosenpass PQ WireGuard baseline.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  106. Hardware-Level Mitigation of Micro-Architectural Leakages in Embedded Processors

    Proposes RTL-level architectural changes to general-purpose processors that remove the root causes of micro-architectural leakage, so masked cryptographic software runs securely under the Robust but Relaxed (RR) d-probing model without security-aware compilers or hardware-specific software workarounds. Each countermeasure is formally proven secure and integrated into the Ibex RISC-V core, which is evaluated by tool-assisted leakage assessment of the full netlist and by physical measurements on an FPGA.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  107. Nowhere Man: Device Binding for Post-Quantum Anonymous Credentials

    Presents a modular device-binding protocol for post-quantum anonymous credentials. The phone Secure Element signs a verifier challenge with an unmodified FIPS 204 ML-DSA interface, and the user proves knowledge of that signature in zero knowledge at each presentation. Using ML-DSA's structure avoids the cost of generic NIZK systems such as Longfellow. The most efficient variants assume weak-MLWR for unlinkability, and that assumption can be dropped at some efficiency cost. The protocol works with different anonymous credential schemes, and a proof-of-concept implementation is included. This matters for planned EU age-verification and Google Wallet/mDL rollouts, which need protection against credential sharing.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  108. Connecting Cryptanalytic Distinguishers through Divisibility

    Paper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves Beyne–Verbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  109. Visual Tokens on Demand: Visual Budgeting for Scalable and Efficient Multi-Image Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs

    Proposes mmVB, a lightweight plug-and-play module (1.6M trainable parameters) that assigns query-conditioned per-image visual token budgets using cross-image context for multimodal LLMs, without retraining the base model or accessing attention matrices (so it is compatible with FlashAttention). It cuts visual input tokens 9x, giving 5x faster time-to-first-token and 7x fewer prefill FLOPs while keeping 94.4% of full-resolution accuracy across eight multi-image reasoning benchmarks. It matters because existing token pruning, merging and compression methods target single-image redundancy and either need attention maps or retraining.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  110. OmniCompass: A Holistic Benchmark for Omni-Modal Video Grounding and Understanding

    OmniCompass is a manually annotated benchmark for video grounding and understanding with two tracks: OmniCompass-VL (820 videos, 2,460 instances; vision-language models) and OmniCompass-AV (240 videos, 720 instances; joint audio-visual evidence for omni-modal models). Each track covers temporal grounding, spatial grounding and QA across short/medium/long videos, and each instance is run in paired text-only and text+image target specifications. Evaluating 50 MLLMs shows open-source models lag proprietary ones, especially on audio-visual understanding, that precise temporal/spatial grounding remains hard, and that predictions are inconsistent across the paired specifications.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  111. Beyond the Verdict: Agentic Code Judging with Verifiable Feedback

    Proposes a task where a model judges and diagnoses a candidate program from only the problem statement and source code, backing its verdict with generated counterexamples that can be checked by execution. The authors build USACO-JUDGE from USACO 2026 contests (human and LLM-written accepted and unaccepted programs) and train ARBITER, a 35B MoE agentic verifier, with reinforcement learning in a generic execution sandbox. Training lifts counterexample success on incorrect programs from 40.61% to 62.67% and mean binary verdict accuracy from 71.41% to 87.41%. ARBITER also improves code selection and refinement, and in an IOI 2026 case study its guided refinement lifts GPT-OSS-120B's expected score above the gold-medal threshold under the official submission limit.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  112. Geometric Calibration of Supervised Fine-Tuning

    Proposes Geometric Calibration of supervised fine-tuning and SPACE (Subspace Projection for Adapted Checkpoint Enhancement). SPACE is a post-hoc, data-free, training-free method that uses the pre- and post-SFT checkpoints to revert SFT update components lying in the principal subspace of the pre-SFT weights and keep those in the orthogonal complement. It is evaluated on Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.1 and Olmo-3 models (2B–14B) with math, coding and medical SFT. It reduces out-of-domain regression and improves in-domain performance, for example +2.85 ID / +2.26 OOD on Qwen2.5-7B math SFT.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  113. Hybrid Quantum–Computational Key Distribution with Reduced Assumptions (Short Paper)

    Short paper analysing the HM-QCT hybrid quantum–computational time-lock QKD protocol (Mazzoncini et al., 2025). It spells out the two "harvest now, decrypt later" strategies (quantum memory and classical memory) and shows each is excluded by exactly one of the two assumptions: short-term encryption and low-fidelity quantum storage. It then proposes HM-PRF, which replaces the short-term encryption with a locally evaluated pseudorandom function, so security needs only one-way functions rather than a predicted lasting gap in quantum memory technology.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  114. EmoGenie: Benchmarking and Evaluating Expressed and Evoked Emotion in T2I Generation with MLLMs

    EmoGenie is a benchmark for emotions expressed and evoked by text-to-image outputs. It has 6,400 images from eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts. It includes EmoGenie-QA (90,000 closed-set and 1,057 open-ended questions) and EmoGenie-Assess (13,175 mean opinion scores for valence, arousal, dominance and aesthetic quality). The authors also propose EmoProbe, which pairs emotion QA with response-aligned, dimension-specific regression heads. They report that it beats baselines on emotion QA and correlates better with human ratings. The work shows how reliably MLLMs interpret affect in generated images.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  115. Heading Hierarchy Reconstruction for Complex and Long Documents with Level-Wise Multimodal Memory

    Proposes a vision-language-model framework that incrementally reconstructs heading hierarchies across tens or hundreds of pages using a level-wise multimodal memory. The memory keeps a compact set of earlier pages chosen by anchors (here, the most recent node at each heading level), so the VLM sees the visual, textual and layout patterns of headings at every level. The authors also introduce CLDoc-HHRBench (250 documents, 11,212 pages, expert-verified annotations) and report results on it and three existing benchmarks. It matters for RAG pipelines that need coherent document-level structure, which page-by-page OCR/VLM parsing doesn't give.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  116. AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

    Anthropic's Frontier Red Team tests whether small open-weight models (≤30B) can autonomously replicate across commodity IoT devices. They ran Gemma4-26B-A4B over 15 off-brand Android TV boxes at 0.39 tok/s with pipeline parallelism. A Qwen3.5-9B-class model set up inference on 8 of 9 hardware types, and only GLM-5.2 completed end-to-end worm replication in an 8-node redroid ADB network, spreading to 8/8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials and 7/8 in the other. It also estimates spread using the Kimwolf botnet's size (~133k replicas, about 40 H100s of compute), shows notes inherited between generations improve Qwen3.5-9B's setup success (45% to 61–84%), and projects small models reaching the capability floor by end of 2026. It closes with defensive points: drive R0 below 1, and harden IoT devices.

    anthropic.compaperPublished and added 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  117. Genericity in multivariate cryptography

    The paper proves that some properties of UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar) public-key ideals and varieties hold generically. These include equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and radicality of the public key ideals. This justifies the regularity assumptions used in algebraic cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. The authors also review earlier multivariate schemes that were broken because they were non-generic, and give one counter-example whose non-genericity looks hard to exploit.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  118. Breaking First-Order Masked Kyber with Belief Propagation Alone

    Preprint recovering the long-term key of a first-order masked Kyber768 implementation on an ARM Cortex-M4 from about 2200 decapsulation power traces using only valid ciphertexts. A profiled neural network estimates Hamming-weight distributions of both arithmetic shares, which are turned into likelihoods on decryption noise and combined by a belief-propagation solver with Gaussian interference approximation and an Onsager (AMP) correction, recovering all 1536 secret and error coefficients without lattice reduction. It shows first-order masking is insufficient against combined second-order leakage, and that least squares, greedy solvers and lattice hints (BKZ block size 624 to 505 at 2000 traces) do worse.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  119. A methodology to derive security specifications for complex electronic systems

    Paper proposing a risk-based methodology to derive security specifications for complex electronic systems such as AI chips and chiplet-based designs. It walks from system missions to assets, threat analysis, security requirements and then countermeasure selection. The method is illustrated on datacenter and automotive chiplets for the missions of secure provisioning, trimming, debugging, booting and remote attestation, and addresses the longer supply chain and multi-tenant threats that chiplets introduce.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

  120. Faster generic CCA secure KEM transformation using encrypt-then-MAC

    The paper proposes a generic encrypt-then-MAC transformation for building CCA-secure KEMs. The PKE ciphertext is authenticated by a MAC keyed from the PKE plaintext, so decapsulation no longer needs the Fujisaki-Okamoto re-encryption step. It proves IND-CCA security in the random oracle model from OW-PCA, and IND-qCCA security from a new OW-qPCA notion. It presents ML-KEM-EtM and McElieceEtM (Classic McEliece), and benchmarks ML-KEM-EtM with Poly1305, GMAC, CMAC and KMAC256. The result is a substantially lower decapsulation cycle count for a small cost in encapsulation cycles and ciphertext size.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Showing 120 of 303

Show more