94 results for “RSA”

Understanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMs is an arXiv paper (October 2026) on role spoofing, a prompt injection where malicious tool output impersonates the user. It shows models track "who said what" using both content cues (semantics, style) and structure cues (control tokens, formatting). Attacks combining fake structure and content succeed often, adversarial training stops only content-based attacks, and linear probes trained to predict conversation roles detect spoofing across settings.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper measures the energy cost of speculative decoding in SGLang with CUDA graphs on H100 and H200 GPUs, at batch sizes up to 64 across 5 corpora. Savings depend on drafted-token acceptance, which is lower on conversation than code and lower on Romansh than English. Savings shrink as batch size grows, and block drafters can push verification into the compute-bound regime, where speculation raises energy per token.

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

Shor's algorithm compiled on cat qubits is an IACR ePrint (2026/2665) giving an end-to-end resource estimate on superconducting cat qubits, using repetition and LDPC cat codes. Factoring RSA-2048 needs about 23,000 cat qubits and 3.14 days, assuming phase-flip noise p_Z = 5e-4 and no bit-flips. secp256k1 ECDLP needs at most 30,000 qubits and 1 hour. A space-for-time trade runs RSA-2048 in 1.25 hours on about 611,000 qubits.

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

Preprint on using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum sensing for electromagnetic side-channel analysis of ICs. The authors build an NV-based RF spectrometer with 1.1 GHz real-time bandwidth and adjustable center frequency, which reads the spectrum in the time domain without Fourier transforms or frequency sweeps. They use it on RSA decryption emanations and for leakage detection on a software Number Theoretic Transform running on a Cortex-M4 microcontroller.

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

SentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety deployments. It scores attack success, over-refusal (missing a real emergency) and over-reaction (unwarranted action) on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts, disaster messages and injection payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution pushed over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety settings (public alerts, responder dispatch, citizen-record queries). It scores attack success, over-refusal and over-reaction on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts and real injection/jailbreak payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution raised over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm on every model.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

HerHealthGPT is a conversational AI system for women's reproductive health that combines retrieval-augmented generation, context-aware clarification and source validation in a web interface. Evidence retrieval raises concern-category accuracy from 54.1% to 59.3% over fine-tuning alone on 540 messages from 90 cases. The clarification router reaches 85.6% recall and 86.2% specificity. In a 30-adult study, 83.3% preferred the retrieval-enabled version. The authors say clinical validation is still needed.

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

This IACR ePrint 2026/2632 paper by Demirtaş and Yayla analyses the Crites–Stewart adaptive forgery attack on threshold Schnorr signatures, which needs one call to a sparse linear search oracle (bounded distance decoding of a scaled Reed–Solomon code). It shows that choosing the commitment coefficient vector does not help much: a wrapper adversary with Q challenges succeeds with probability at most QM/p, even if its solvers decode every witness for free. For the six original (N, τ) pairs, M stays below 2^24, so the bound is under 2^-100 after 2^128 challenges at p = 2^252.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper compares LoRA and full fine-tuning for prompt-safety classification using a matched 400M encoder-decoder pair (Ettin) across three task formats, with up to 15 seeds per cell and pre-specified analyses. Full fine-tuning leads LoRA by 2-3 pp at the pre-specified learning rates, and the encoder gap closes when both use the same learning-rate search. Training LoRA to write a reason after its verdict adds 4.0 pp, while a content-free sentence of equal length does not. Trained models beat a prompted 8B in domain but trail it by 8-23 pp on adversarial jailbreaks and over-flag benign prompts (27-66% against 2-3%).

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

OWLS (Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields) plans directly over a vision-language model's dense feature map. A text prompt describing traversable terrain scores every pixel of one camera image. The scores are projected onto the ground, adapted with two morphological operations, and used as the speed field of a minimum-time planner. It needs no training, terrain labels, map or extra sensors. It was tested on a physical rover, on simulated Mars and Moon rovers over 200 procedural terrains, and on real planetary imagery.

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

GordieHowe is a language, certifying compiler and zero-knowledge proof system for building anonymous credentials on standardized signatures (ECDSA, RSA, ML-DSA). It proves an ECDSA-signed mobile driving license presentation in 64.8 ms with a 276 KiB proof, 10.1x faster than Google's Longfellow, and an ML-DSA-44 signature in 87.3 ms with at least 116 bits of quantum security. Compiler output and security theorems are checked in Lean. It introduces series-parallel IOPs and extends the BCS transformation in the QROM.

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

Rentaro Shiba and Tetsu Iwata prove a tight multi-key security bound for the FX construction (the DESX generalization) in the quantum ideal cipher model. Security holds up to about 2^((n+κ)/3) total classical and quantum oracle queries against fully adaptive adversaries, for any number of keyed instances μ≥1. This improves their ToSC 2026 bound and matches the offline Simon's algorithm attack in the exponent.

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

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

This paper presents an offline evaluation harness for a production merchant-facing conversational agent. It stays reproducible when live backend data changes and can be regenerated when it goes stale. Used as the fitness function for GEPA prompt optimization under a correctness gate against reward hacking, it shrinks the full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without losing held-out correctness, across three subject-model families.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

SBFS-FT (symmetry-based few-shot fine-tuning) adapts the MatterSim 1M universal machine-learned interatomic potential with low-rank adaptation on a small set of compounds sharing one crystal symmetry. Tested on half-Heusler (space group 216), space group 225 and spinel (227) datasets, it cut lattice thermal conductivity error 2-3 times versus the base model. It matched per-compound fine-tuning while taking 5-7 times less compute for 100 compounds.

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

SHAKEing SLH-DSA with Non-profiled SCAs is an eShard ePrint paper (2026/2584) on correlation power analysis of SLH-DSA-SHAKE, the NIST-standardised hash-based signature scheme. It analyses PRF inputs and selection functions, then combines subtrace averaging, partial-then-total CPA and an efficient exhaustive search to recover the full secret seed, enabling universal forgery. On a 32-bit microcontroller the attack needs about 280 to 559 signatures, and the search finishes within 45 minutes on 72 cores.

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

Reverse Engineering IVXV is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Tingfeng Yu and Thomas Haines that reconstructs a specification of Estonia's IVXV internet voting system from public source code and documentation, with an executable TLA+ model checked in TLC. It analyses individual and universal verifiability, privacy, coercion resistance and eligibility, compares IVXV with Belenios and Swiss Post, and reports new vulnerabilities, some confirmed with proof-of-concept tests, plus mitigations.

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

Concrete LDVR Attacks with Fewer Signers is an ePrint paper by Renas Bacho on the low-dimensional vector representation (LDVR) problem behind adaptive security of threshold Schnorr. It combines a Chinese remainder theorem construction with a generalized birthday search to attack 488 signers with 173 corruptions over the Curve25519 scalar field, down from 5,020 signers. For adversarial evaluation points, it reaches optimal success probability and breaks 228 signers with 114 corruptions in 168.60 seconds.

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

Evasive Inner Product Functional Encryption Is Broken Too is a 2026 ePrint paper by Agrawal, Modi, Yadav and Yamada. It gives a counterexample showing the evasive IPFE assumption of Hsieh, Lin and Luo (Eurocrypt 2024) is false in full generality. The attack extends the 2025 PRFE counterexample and needs only the weak inner product functionality, not pseudorandom function computation. The authors conclude that letting the adversary choose unrestricted private coins breaks the Evasive LWE family.

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

ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework for LLM tools, including MCP servers. It maps each tool argument, using its metadata, to one of 74 CWE-guided semantics-aware sanitizers (path, URL, SQL and similar). It then generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses and semantic oracles, using runtime tracers for in-process tools and outcome oracles for opaque ones. The LLM (gpt-4.1) only maps sanitizers and writes seeds; it is never the security judge. The paper also shows a "Repeat-After-Me" trick, where an LLM told to repeat attacker-crafted text emits a tool call the orchestrator executes, reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK 2.0, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. Across 273 runnable MCP servers (3,405 tools) it reports 253 verified bugs in 343 tools across 118 servers, such as path traversal, log injection and exfiltration. These are failures a crash-based fuzzer would miss. The result matters because it shows LLM-generated tool arguments cannot be treated as trusted.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework that derives semantic security checks for LLM tools (mainly MCP servers) from their metadata and a corpus of 74 CWE-guided sanitizers. It generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses, uses runtime tracers and outcome oracles to catch bugs that don't crash, and uses an LLM only to map sanitizers and seed inputs, never as the judge. It also describes a "Repeat-After-Me" attack, in which the LLM is told to repeat attacker-written text that the orchestrator then dispatches as a tool call. It was reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. On 273 MCP servers it reports 253 verified bugs across 343 tools in 118 repositories, including path traversal, log injection, exfiltration and command bypass.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

R^2ECAP (Reused Reasoning-Cache Poisoning) is a black-box attack that plants poisoned reasoning traces through a chat interface, exploiting LLM systems that reuse KV caches of reasoning. A preceding trace steers the model, and the retained trace keeps residual adversarial influence in its cache after the preceding trace is discarded. On three open-weight LLMs and three datasets it reaches up to 79% ASR, beats the white-box HijackKV in 8 of 9 settings, and reaches 46% ASR in a reasoning-trace retrieval system. Only 1% of retained responses are flagged by a popular prompt injection detector.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) across multi-turn, tool-mediated dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward for violation discovery, plausibility, progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent, positioning behavioral auditing as a distinct axis next to capability and safety benchmarks.

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

PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) over multi-turn dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward balancing violation discovery, behavioral plausibility, conversation progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization in a controlled setting. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than same-architecture zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent. This positions multi-turn behavioral auditing as a distinct evaluation axis alongside capability and safety benchmarks.

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

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

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

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

INFUSE is an end-to-end benchmark for indirect prompt injection (IPI) across long-horizon agent workflows (shell commands, code changes, dependency installs, remote services). It has 40 realistic tasks and a taxonomy of 56 attack scenarios in five threat categories, with attacks injected via interaction surfaces encountered mid-task. Across 19 LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Gemma, Qwen) and 41,824 adversarial trajectories, mean attack success was 19.6% (LLM-judged) and 15.4% (heuristic), per-model 3.2–41.9%; guard models gave limited protection, while prompt-level hardening cut mean ASR from 58.2% to 14.3%.

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

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

DPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying ϵ-differential privacy. It combines private step sizes with a DP noise-decay schedule and adds a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter that suppresses Byzantine updates during aggregation. The authors prove almost-sure convergence to the global optimum despite persistent noise and adversaries. On synthetic and MNIST data, final optimization error is one to two orders of magnitude lower than DP baselines.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint entry for an ACM CCS 2026 paper in the "Attacks and cryptanalysis" category. By its title and keywords, it shows that snapshots of encrypted databases built on trusted execution environments leak plaintext frequency histograms, using a technique called "dendrochronology". The abstract and full text are embargoed until the end of October 2026, so the attack mechanics are not available yet. It matters to anyone assessing the real leakage of TEE-backed encrypted databases against snapshot adversaries.

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

The paper studies regressive sycophancy under fabricated evidence: a medical VLM gives a correct answer, then abandons it when the user pushes back with a fake prescription. It tests four open VLMs on 400 VQA-RAD yes/no questions in 19,200 multi-turn conversations. Without a synthetic-document disclosure, models abandon 80.1% of 6,488 correct answers, and the same prescription raises Qwen2.5-VL-7B's flip rate from 45.9% to 89.6% while lowering Qwen3-VL-8B's from 77.7% to 50.9%. Models often reject the prescription yet keep the correct answer in only some conversations (915 of 3,232), and 40% of those flip later. System-prompt disclosure of synthetic documents cuts one model's flip rate from 77.8% to 47.3%. The authors conclude that recognising a forgery does not stop a model from adopting the forged answer.

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

Cryptography paper that extends Chen and Fischlin's two-user Signal analysis (Eurocrypt 2024) to group chats. It introduces "causal awareness": a receiver can reconstruct part of the causal context in which an accepted message was sent. Network delay or adversarial interference can otherwise show an authentic message in a misleading context. Senders transmit records of what they have sent and received, and receivers verify these records and compare them with their own. The paper gives correctness and security definitions parameterized by how much causal information must be recovered, baseline constructions with proofs, and checkpoint-aided and server-aided variants. It also discusses how to surface this information in a messenger's UI.

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

The paper introduces verifiable reconstructible straightline codes (VRSCs) as an abstraction for compiling zkSNARKs into Universally Composable (UC) secure protocols. It shows that the witness-succinct UC compiler of Ganesh et al. (EUROCRYPT 2023) is missing a security requirement: permuting previously revealed evaluation openings yields a fresh accepting proof, which invalidates the claimed simulation argument. The fix uses verifier-enforced disjoint evaluation domains and a pairing-based Fischlin-style instantiation with structured Reed-Solomon codes and jointly computed KZG openings. This brings certificate generation to O(n log n) with constant extra proof size and verification work.

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

StableJudge is a defense framework against score-hijacking prompt injection in LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines (e.g. paper review, recommendation). A compact 0.13B "Sentry" model localizes injected spans and sanitizes them before the judge scores the content, trained on adversarially evolving attacks, and deterministic fine-grained scores are derived from the judge's output distribution. It improves score recovery under attack on held-out scientific abstracts and out-of-distribution attack variants while preserving general performance, decoupling safety from judge model scale. Code and data are promised but not yet released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Position paper arguing that as AI makes machine-checked proofs cheap, the scarce resource is a human who can read what was proved. It cites a Lean library's Schnorr signature security theorem that passed the checker but held for every adversary and so promised nothing. It shows that on a one-page Verifpal model, two of five verdicts flip under other standard definitions of properties such as forward secrecy. It proposes short, owner-written high-level cryptographic languages, with every claim backed by a checked theorem and a small, versioned, publicly agreed set of built-in security definitions.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

BLiMPPI is a multilingual evaluation suite of over 12,000 negative polarity item (NPI) minimal pairs across 33 languages. A pipeline finds NPIs in Universal Dependencies treebanks, labels their licensing environments, and perturbs them into grammatical/ungrammatical pairs. Across 12 multilingual and 2 monolingual models plus n-gram baselines, multilingual models do worst on lower-resource languages and on pairs that n-grams cannot solve. The paper also analyses NPI typology, language family, licensing variability and NPI-licenser distance.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SmartSalesBench is a multi-turn conversational benchmark that tests LLM sales agents against psychologically grounded, resistant buyer personas over conversations of up to twenty turns. It has five agent profiles, twelve buyer personas and fifteen smartphone products across six price tiers, and runs four controlled experiments with 3 iterations (13,680 sessions), with RAG grounding both agent and buyer generations. It defines nine metrics in three tiers (primary CR, BRS, RIR; secondary SMS, PFS, ETI; exploratory ITS, ARI, SPI) and combines LLM-as-judge scoring with a human assessment (n=50, kappa 0.71, Pearson r 0.81 with BRS). It matters because it drops the cooperative-user assumption of existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AgentValve is a protocol for authorizing payments by AI agents in permissionless markets where adversaries can cheaply create Sybil identities and fake feedback to inflate provider reputation. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph, and a smart contract atomically reserves capacity along trust paths for each admitted payment. This bounds honest agents' exposure to the capacity they extend into the adversarial region, and payment-backed capacity creation with bounded route length limits depletion attacks. A witness-commit mechanism makes on-chain route verification linear work with constant persistent state per payment. The prototype was evaluated on six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads with up to 10,000 Sybil identities. Exposure and depletion stayed bounded, admission cost fell by up to 40.8% against baselines, and common payments cost about $0.04–$0.21.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentValve is a protocol for Sybil-resilient payment authorization when AI agents pick and pay service providers without human review in permissionless markets. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph, and a smart contract atomically reserves capacity along trust paths. This bounds honest agents' payment exposure to the capacity they extend into the adversarial region, so fake identities and fabricated feedback inside that region cannot raise the bound. Payment-backed capacity creation and bounded route length limit depletion by malicious senders. A witness-commit mechanism splits off-chain route discovery from on-chain verification, cutting verification to linear work with constant persistent state per payment. A prototype evaluated on six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads, with up to 10,000 Sybil identities, kept exposure and depletion bounded. Admission cost fell by up to 40.8% versus baselines, at roughly $0.04-$0.21 per common payment.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 13 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

A narrative review in HCI arguing that the single-voice chatbot interface causes three harms: cognitive offloading, ideological narrowing of user beliefs, and epistemic compression of cultural and value diversity. It proposes multi-persona interfaces, which show several personas to the user at once, as a low-cost fix. The design draws on game design and participatory simulation (magic circle, role differentiation, persona embodiment). It offers a taxonomy for designing such interfaces and calls for empirical studies that link technical pluralistic alignment methods to real human-AI interaction.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper tests whether LLM legal explanations reflect what drives the verdict. Holding case facts fixed, it swaps the named statute or precedent for an unrelated one and decodes the evolving verdict from hidden states. Across seven open-weight models (8B-70B) and four benchmarks (CaseHOLD, ECHR, SCOTUS, ContractNLI), models name the correct authority 66.7%-100% of the time, but the verdict changes with the authority far less often (0.0%-21.7% on CaseHOLD, 30.0%-76.7% on ECHR and SCOTUS, 43.3%-50.0% on ContractNLI). Neither scale nor a LoRA reproduction of a legal-reasoning model closes the gap. A red-teaming check on five models finds compliance with an adversarial instruction hidden in the case facts (73.3%-96.4%) far exceeds verdict-swap sensitivity. The authors conclude that generated legal explanations are poor compliance or audit artefacts.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Presents Reverse-Bleichenbacher, a variant of the Bleichenbacher RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 padding-oracle attack that recovers the least significant bytes first and stops once the TLS PreMasterSecret is found. With improved trimmers and coverage-optimized search, median oracle queries against a 2048-bit key drop from 11,428 to 1,801, and 68.3% of runs finish within a 30s timeout under single-server conditions. The authors find 640 vulnerable domains in the Tranco Top 1M (many behind Alibaba Cloud load balancers) and demonstrate MITM malicious update injection leading to remote code execution.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters (LTBD), a defense against prompt injection that uses a few learnable delimiters to mark trusted user instructions versus untrusted external data, without changing LLM parameters. It reports 0.00% ASR on AlpacaFarm and 0.11-0.19% on TaskTracker, outperforming inference-time defenses and rivaling training-based ones with negligible overhead. It also holds up against adaptive attacks where the adversary knows the defense.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

BRANCH is a bypass methodology for guardrail systems built from multiple scanners (prompt injection/jailbreak detectors). It uses a branching tree search that applies adversarial perturbations to individual scanners and selects techniques based on overall improvement across all scanners, decoupling bypass evaluation from attack signal optimization. It reports 100% attack success across 6 guardrail systems in 120 scenarios with 72% fewer queries and 4.5x lower wallclock time than established techniques, and transfers to 29 unseen guardrails, including 8 commercial black-box ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces a detector for adversarial images targeting frozen vision-language models (VLMs) by building a 'response profile' from how an image interacts with a bank of general semantic prompts — using category-level statistics, inter-prompt relationships, deviation from clean reference distributions, and stability under weak image transforms, then classifying that compact profile with a lightweight model. Evaluated across multiple public datasets, several CLIP-style visual backbones, and gradient-based, optimization-based, automated, and spatial attacks, the method outperforms embedding-geometry baselines, generalizes partially to unseen attacks, and is tested against detector-aware adaptive attacks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

An IACR ePrint paper by Erik-Oliver Blass and Travis Mayberry proposing oblivious probabilistic hash tables (chaining, power-of-two-choices, stash-less cuckoo, de-amortized cuckoo hashing) built over Path ORAM as a replacement for oblivious AVL trees when deployed inside Intel SGX enclaves. It shows that SGX's small trusted client memory lets the position map recursion be shrunk to ≤3 levels, making constant-access hash tables beat Θ(log n) tree traversal, and derives via large-scale simulation the concrete padding parameters needed for "double obliviousness" (bounding hash-table rebuild probability to ≤2^-40) that prior ORAM literature lacked. Their SGX implementation reports up to 20x faster lookups and 12x faster inserts than oblivious-tree baselines.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces Alhena (synchronous) and Wasat (asynchronous), two helper-aided multi-party computation protocols that achieve "identifiable fairness": if an adversary aborts the protocol, no party gets the output and honest parties can identify at least one common cheater, closing a gap in prior fair-but-unaccountable helper-aided MPC schemes. The authors benchmark against state-of-the-art fair protocols Asterisk and Castor (both from Kamarkar et al., IEEE S&P 2024/2026), showing 4–12.5x and 2.5–5x online-phase speedups respectively, with online performance unaffected by active misbehavior.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR ePrint paper breaks Origami, a multivariate post-quantum signature scheme submitted to the NGCC round-1 public-key call, showing its bilinear construction is effectively a Rainbow-type scheme whose central map leaks through the public verification key in a predictable coordinate order. The authors derive an equivalent secret key from the public key alone, enabling universal forgery at roughly the cost of one signature verification (~0.01s at Origami-128), and demonstrate the attack against the unmodified reference implementation across all four parameter sets and the official test vectors. They also refute Origami's security proof by breaking its inversion assumption in a bilinear independent-coefficient model, and note a separate structural flaw where honest signatures lie in a proper subspace rather than the full space the specification assumes.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper proposes a formal framework for "alignment scaling laws," modeling the compute/capability burden needed to hold a fixed safety target for each risk category as a power law B_r(N)=a_rN^alpha_r, where the exponent alpha_r determines whether alignment gets easier, keeps pace, or accumulates "alignment debt" as capability N grows. The authors prove theoretical results (the largest exponent among corrected risks sets the long-run regime, super-exponential headroom requirements above alpha=1, small-model fits underestimate large-scale exponents for power-law mixtures) and apply a preregistered protocol twice: a reanalysis of adversarial-training data on Pythia classifiers (attack-success compute exponent 0.60) and a pilot across Qwen2.5 (0.5B-72B) and Qwen3 (0.6B-14B), finding scaling helps for truthfulness and stated dispositions but sycophancy (exponent ~0.83-0.89) and a planted backdoor behave worse or remain undetermined, with the backdoor surviving blind safety training at most model sizes. The work matters as an early attempt to put the "does alignment get harder with scale" debate on measurable, falsifiable footing rather than anecdote.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv methodology paper extends empirical Bayes g-modeling, which estimates a latent prior over regression coefficients from data, to the case where the entire prior distribution depends on covariates. The authors show the unrestricted nonparametric MLE (NPMLE) of this covariate-dependent prior is ill-posed, and resolve it by introducing an "infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing" class of conditional priors, proving that the resulting NPMLE is exactly a softmax-gated Mixture of Experts whose number of experts is determined by the data rather than fixed in advance. They give two exemplar-based estimation algorithms with automatic expert selection, a post-hoc aggregation step for interpretability, and theoretical results (Lipschitz continuity of conditional priors, universal approximation of continuous gating functions by aggregated softmax gates), validated on synthetic and real datasets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies prompt-injection attacks against AI agent "skill" marketplaces where a router dynamically selects which third-party skill to execute. The authors show existing injection attacks lose 87-97% of their effective attack success rate once a skill must first win retrieval against competing skills, and introduce CORSA (Cluster Optimization for Router-Aware Skill Attacks), which jointly optimizes injections for retrieval and execution, improving end-to-end attack success while preserving user utility and transferring across different router architectures and LLM backbones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper studies SKILL.md files — the natural-language metadata describing modular AI Agent Skills — as an attack surface, demonstrating semantic supply-chain attacks against real ClawHub skills. Using text-only manipulations, the authors manipulate embedding-based Discovery retrieval (up to 86% pairwise win rate, 80% Top-10 placement), bias agent Selection toward adversarial variants (77.6% average success), and evade Governance blocking verdicts (36.5%-100% evasion), showing that skill metadata is operational text that shapes agent trust rather than passive documentation.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

BazaarBench is a simulated consumer-to-consumer marketplace benchmark that measures whether LLM agents acting as buyers and sellers stay safe and honest — tracking ownership, item condition, and commitments to detect six failure types across five transaction stages. Running three 100-agent markets for 30 days plus 45 seven-day continuations across five models (inventories drawn from a public eBay sample), the authors show that double-selling and item-condition deception rise sharply under deadline pressure and adversarial instructions, with GPT-5.4 completing 55.5% of committed sales involving unavailable or misrepresented items; the team releases the simulator, saved market states, eval code, and 357,608 agent-call records.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MedPrune is a multi-agent framework for medical visual question answering that models the diagnostic process as a heterogeneous communication graph of specialist agents across departments, then dynamically prunes both nodes (irrelevant specialist agents, via reinforcement learning) and edges (low-value intra-/inter-departmental connections) to cut redundant communication. The authors report it beats existing multi-agent baselines on medical VQA benchmarks under both full-set and few-shot settings while improving token efficiency and adversarial robustness.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

An IACR ePrint paper presenting optimized Montgomery multiplication/squaring kernels for RSA-2048 and RSA-3072 CRT private-key operations on ARM Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, targeting cryptographic tokens that must keep RSA for legacy authentication compatibility. Using 15-bit limbs, wrapped-sum carry recovery (M0+) and doubled half-diagonal buffer limbs (M3), the authors report 12.6–13.1% faster Montgomery operations and ~12.6–12.8% faster warm CRT-RSA cycles on M0+, smaller gains on M3, and a 31.47% cycle advantage over an NTT-based multiplication for 2048-bit operands.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Victor Shoup shows that "reconstruct-later" asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID) designs — used by data-availability systems including an early Walrus design/testnet — are insecure when built on the standardized Raptor codes R10 (RFC 5053) and RaptorQ (RFC 6330). Using the Plotkin bound, he proves that a Byzantine disperser can choose a subset of f+1 honest fragments that fails to reconstruct the message, gives randomized polynomial-time algorithms to find such subsets, and implements a working attack that defeats an RFC 6330 RaptorQ decoder on every adversarial subset tested (success for f from 9 to 45). Benchmarks show plain Reed-Solomon coding is an MDS alternative that is often faster and never much slower than R10/RaptorQ, making it the safer practical choice for this design pattern.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

RubricArmor is an adversarial framework for generating evaluation rubrics used in rubric-based reinforcement learning of LLMs, designed to preempt reward hacking before RL training begins. It alternates an attack step, which synthesizes adversarial responses that satisfy the current rubric while failing the actual task, with a repair step that revises the rubric to close the exposed gaps while keeping valid criteria intact. The paper reports that rubrics produced this way outperform existing LLM-based rubric generation baselines and lead to more effective downstream rubric-based RL.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

COPEX (COntext Provider EXploitation) is a benchmark that isolates the tool-selecting LLM as the unit of evaluation in Model Context Protocol systems, fixing the surrounding agent stack and varying only the model to measure its intrinsic susceptibility to adversarial context. It covers 25 attack types across 125 scenarios spanning four entry surfaces — model/agent, client, server/tool, and transport — and tests nine models across 3,375 trials, finding a mean attack success rate of 64.4% (58.3%–71.4% by surface); combined input and context scanning cut mean attack success by 49.6% on an eight-attack defense subset. The work separates "system exposure" (attacks succeeding outside the model's observation/control) from "model susceptibility," and the benchmark itself is released publicly.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security