76 results for “Block”

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

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

Kolesnikov and Novoselov give block basis reduction (BKZ) algorithms for linear codes that need polynomial or quasi-polynomial numbers of calls to a minimum weight codeword oracle at fixed block size. The earlier Ghentiyala and Stephens-Davidowitz bounds are exponential. The paper adds a truncated BKZ and a DeepBKZ variant, with an implementation for block sizes 2 to 24 and approximation-factor estimates on random codes.

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

DICE is a blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) algorithm for customizing large pretrained models among untrusted Web3 participants. It combines dynamic progressive learning and model slice verification, so hardware-limited participants can train part of the model, with a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to scale to more data holders. Experiments cover vision and language models.

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

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

FlatCake is a KV cache storage architecture for LLM serving that treats host DRAM and NVMe SSD as peer media in one 64-bit address space, instead of a DRAM-over-SSD tier. Blocks are placed once, in session-contiguous, layer-major order, and streamed via GPUDirect Storage. On a Claude Code trace with DeepSeek-V4-Flash it holds a 94% hit rate (Mooncake: 64%) and cuts peak-load mean TTFT 1.6x.

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

LINE-Break is a security analysis of Letter Sealing v2, the custom end-to-end encryption protocol in the LINE messenger. A TLS man-in-the-middle attacker or malicious server can replay, reorder and block messages undetected, and colluding users can forge message authorship in one-to-one and group chats. Stickers and URL previews leak plaintext. The attacks were verified on the real iOS app and an independent implementation.

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

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

A Memory-efficient Implementation of Wiedemann XL is an ePrint paper (2026/2641) giving the first efficient on-the-fly implementation of XL with block Wiedemann for the multivariate quadratic problem. It builds on the CCNY SSE implementation, removes column-index tables, and computes column indices with O(n^2) instead of O(n^3) look-ups. It runs in comparable BW1 time with up to five times less memory, and an AVX2 port covers F256, the main field of UOV.

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

Provable Security of SHA-256-Based LMS Revisited in the Ideal-Cipher Model is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Chun Guo, Hao Cheng, Bart Preneel and Meiqin Wang. It shows forgery attacks on LMS_SHA256_M32 and LMS_SHA256_M24 that exploit Merkle-Damgård structure, so the Katz and Fluhrer random-oracle bounds do not apply. It proves ideal-cipher-model bounds: about 256 minus log2 of the block count for M32, and a minimum of two terms for M24.

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

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

MPQ (Message-Passing Quantization) is a post-training quantization method that treats row-wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. It keeps soft posteriors across weight blocks using vector approximate message passing, then refines a hard-decision initialization with exact block coordinate descent. Tested at 2-bit lattice and 3- and 4-bit scalar quantization on Llama, Qwen and Mistral models, it improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over GPTQ-style baselines.

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

Decode-time provenance binding is a defense for Model Context Protocol agent pipelines against cross-modal trust laundering, where instructions hidden in an email-signature image via LSB, DCT or metadata steganography get decoded by a tool. It combines HMAC-authenticated trust labels, a provenance ledger and context-taint tracking to block critical tool calls. On a real MCP testbed with 24 adaptive payloads, attack success fell from 100% undefended (62.5% for keyword and regex filters) to 0%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

SARIA (Selective Admission and Reload for Inference Acceleration) is a KV caching system that jointly manages DRAM and SSD for multi-turn LLM agents. It persists only blocks likely to be reused beyond DRAM residency, promotes SSD-hit blocks into DRAM for same-session reuse, and paces DRAM reads with a transfer coordinator. Built on LMCache MP, it cuts SSD writes by 57.1 to 58.9% versus full duplicate caching and mean TTFT by 42.3 to 79.7% versus DRAM-only caching.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SoK on design-level backdoors in block ciphers. It places four published designs (Rijmen and Preneel, Paterson, Bannier and Filiol, Peyrin and Wang) in one taxonomy and gives a sound algorithm that recovers a partition trapdoor from S-box tables. It attacks KG-DES, BEA-1 and LowMC-M: KG-DES key recovery takes minutes, and the LowMC-M MALICIOUS backdoor yields the key from 35 to 409 queries. Trapdoors hidden in linear layers leave no trace, so the authors recommend deriving constants verifiably from a public seed.

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

Sign Here is an arXiv paper (October 2026) testing whether building packages from source, instead of pulling from registries, prevents malware. It aggregates 47,066 malicious npm and PyPI packages from five datasets and indexes 3.9 million npm and 764 thousand PyPI packages. Checking for an attributed source blocks 87.7 to 99.9 percent of malware depending on vetting level, but only 47.4 percent of benign packages attribute a buildable source.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Lafa (Large flow language model) is a blockwise continuous flow language model scaled to 8B parameters, with causal attention on the prefix and bidirectional, asynchronous flow within each block. It is adapted from pretrained autoregressive models and trained at 0.5B, 7B and 8B with under 30B tokens. A self-speculative decoding scheme verifies flow drafts autoregressively in one model, giving 2.54x the throughput of an AR model at comparable quality. Flow maps allow one- and few-step generation.

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

Preprint by Jiseung Kim, Minkyu Kim, Changmin Lee and Hochang Lee on the Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) problem. It presents a hybrid-algebraic attack that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across regular blocks. Parameter sets in Ferret, Wolverine and committed VOLE fall below 128-bit targets by up to 67 bits, and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) PCG sets cost under 2^111 field operations.

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

Preprint 2026/2563 presents a refined hybrid-algebraic attack on Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across all regular blocks. It puts at least one parameter set each from Ferret (CCS 2020), Wolverine (IEEE S&P 2021) and committed VOLE (CCS 2025) below the 128-bit target, with losses up to 67 bits. PCG attack costs improve by up to 29.77 bits (non-binary) and 25.91 bits (binary), and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) 128-bit sets fall below 2^111 field operations.

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

Tandem is a runtime for serving hybrid linear-attention GUI agents on mobile NPUs. It saves recurrent state where consecutive prompts diverge, keeps most prefill on the matrix unit, uses a verification kernel that reads each weight block once, and releases NPU power votes between bursts. On a Snapdragon 8 Elite it cuts per-step latency 30% for text screen descriptions and 16% for screenshots, cuts energy per text step by 33%, and lowers loaded-model standby power from 0.76 to 0.22 W.

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

SpanGuard is an indirect prompt injection (IPI) guardrail that splits detection into two steps. Lightweight unsupervised segmentation first locates candidate instruction blocks in tool outputs, then a small LLM judges whether each block is authorized by the user's request. The authors report a 0.32% attack success rate with negligible benign utility loss, and the guardrail still works with substantially smaller models.

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

IISFA (Ineffective Instruction-Skip Fault Attack) targets bitsliced block cipher implementations protected by redundancy countermeasures. Skipping one bitslice instruction leaves the result unchanged only when all m S-box inputs fall in an ineffective set, so each released ciphertext restricts all m subkeys. The authors give known- and chosen-plaintext key-recovery procedures and expected injection counts, and recover keys in every trial on GIFT, SKINNY and PIPO implementations on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller using clock glitches.

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

ePrint 2026/2527 by Paola de Perthuis and Filip Trenkić analyses module-BKZ attacks on NTRU+, the South Korean KEM standard. It introduces relative canonical and coefficient embeddings and shows they agree up to scaling exactly when rad(c)/rad(ℓ) is 1 or 2. Simulation-based estimates show the best module attack saves 4 to 10 blocksizes, costing NTRU+ keys at most three bits of Core-SVP security. NTRU+ parameters stay safe in the overstretched regime.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This ePrint paper (2026/2525, October 2026) by Brendan Funk and Jiafeng Xie presents the first hardware accelerator for FAEST, an MPC-in-the-head post-quantum signature in NIST's Round 3 additional-signature process. It analyses FAEST's compute-heavy operations, builds them into hardware blocks, and adds an L1-EM-fast variant. The authors report at least 98% lower equivalent area-delay product than the recent complete SDitH design at the same security level.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Cryptanalysis of the Eevee forkcipher-based AEAD modes Umbreon and Espeon, which claim online AE security under nonce reuse. Associated-data correlations give probability-one non-empty-message forgeries with three encryption queries and one verification query. The paper adds an affine treatment of partial final blocks (n-r+3 queries, or n-r+2 with adaptive choices). It also checks the published Umbreon attack with the official ForkSkinny primitive and reports a two-query attack accepted by the unmodified public C modes.

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

FuTransformer is a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It uses FP8 prefill with fused GEMM epilogues and INT4 weights plus an INT4 KV-cache copy for decode, with a block-diagonal Hadamard transform to cut cache quantization error. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8, and INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster PyTorch baseline. Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for compiled transformers. WikiText-2 perplexity rises from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest INT4 weights, or 6.99 with GPTQ.

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

ThetreStageAI is a retrieval-augmented framework for structured Bengali theatre production planning. It keeps separate scene, actor-blocking and lighting views, embeds Bengali text with BGE-M3, indexes it in view-specific Qdrant collections, and has Gemini generate schema-constrained JSON, with validation and at most one repair attempt. The authors build a synthetic dataset of 500 records (1,500 retrieval documents) and compare single-combined retrieval with multi-view retrieval. Code and data are public.

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

Velox is a training-free attention router for chunked video-diffusion world models. It uses camera frustum slabs with depth intervals from streaming geometry to pick which historical token blocks to attend to, instead of letting the KV cache grow with rollout length. Frustum overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance, and uncovered regions keep the model's own routing. The fixed block granularity suits FlashAttention-style tiled execution, and slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48 it speeds up attention 4.36× and denoising 2.43×, and on the 158-case WBench navigation split it stays within 0.15 average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam.

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

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

Presents a robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for t ≤ (n-1)/3 corrupted signers. It batch-computes pre-processing material for fast online signing and scales to many signers, for uses such as bridging consensus between blockchains. It combines batched verifiable secret sharing (Fitzi & Hirt), randomness extraction (Beerliova-Trubiniova & Hirt), efficient share opening (Damgård & Nielsen) and Attema–Cramer zero-knowledge proofs. The authors implement it and show it is practical for large n.

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

Furue and Aikawa build and analyze algebraic attacks on the Regular Syndrome Decoding Problem (RSDP), which underlies code-based post-quantum schemes. They extend the Wang et al. hybrid algorithm to allow an arbitrary XL solving degree d, and add two variants: an XFL-based one (partial Gaussian elimination plus variable guessing) and a WXL-based one that exploits Macaulay matrix sparsity. Complexity analysis shows the WXL variant with d>2 wins for small block size β, while the original hybrid wins as β grows. This matters for setting RSDP-based scheme parameters.

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

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

Cryptanalysis of the Alternating Sponge (ASP) and Duet, a permutation-based hash candidate in China's ICCS Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic Algorithm program (NGCC). The authors give an O(2^r)-query distinguisher against ASP that contradicts its claimed indifferentiability bound in some parameter regimes. They also give a distinguisher and state-recovery attack on Duet's multi-block output, using O(2^(r+c-h)) permutation queries. Collision and preimage resistance are unaffected, but Duet used as a XOF or KDF is affected, and state recovery enables length extension.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DualQuant is a calibration-free post-training quantization framework for LLM weights and activations. It minimizes weight-reconstruction MSE using variable splitting and block coordinate descent with closed-form subproblem updates. The resulting scaling factors double as per-channel activation rescalings, so no calibration data is needed. It supports the MX family and NVFP4 block formats. On Llama and Qwen models it matches or beats calibration-based SmoothQuant on WikiText-2, C4 and zero-shot tasks. A real packed W4A4 path for Llama-3.1-8B on an RTX 4090 gives up to 2.61x memory reduction and 2.46x throughput over BF16.

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

Proves that the nonce-based MACs Encrypted Wegman-Carter (EWC) and EWCDMD (the dual of EWCDM) are unforgeable beyond the birthday bound. With an n-bit block cipher and an O(2^-n)-AXU hash, both are secure up to 2^{5n/6} MAC queries and nearly 2^n verification queries in the nonce-respecting setting. This settles an open question left by earlier birthday distinguishing attacks (Cogliati–Seurin on EWC, Nandi on EWCDMD), which never yielded forgeries. The proofs analyze forgery events directly through auxiliary experiments. The EWC proof adds conditional permutation analysis and collision multiplicity bounds with KL divergence, and the EWCDMD proof uses Hellinger distance and Fourier analysis.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ePrint paper by Andrew Krapivin and Elaine Shi that breaks the long-standing log-squared upper-bound barrier for statistically secure Oblivious RAM and for oblivious search trees in the external-memory model. It gives an optimal O(log_B N) statistically secure ORAM when B ≥ log^{1+ε} N. It also gives an optimal oblivious search tree when B ≥ log^{2+ε} N, which matches non-oblivious search trees ("obliviousness for free"). The block-size assumptions match hardware-enclave deployments that use oblivious algorithms, such as those of Signal and Meta.

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

OnTrack is a streaming monitor for LLM agents. It uses structure-aware optimal transport to compare an agent's steps and tool dependencies against recorded successful runs, and can alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. It works under three access regimes: full reference (historical runs plus tool schemas), tool schemas only, and step logs only. Monitoring ranges from plan-violation detection to spotting loops, stalls and repeated tool calls. On SWE-bench trajectories, the first 8 steps rank failing runs below succeeding ones better than content-similarity baselines (+0.057 AUROC). An abort policy saves about 18% of compute, and 5 of 6 aborts were correct.

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

The paper formalizes speculative decoding as a Markov reward process and derives the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, a hyperparameter-free training loss equal to the expected number of decoding rounds, addressing cross-round coupling that prior block-local surrogate objectives ignore. It derives an exact temporal-difference gradient for unbiased stochastic optimization and an offline evaluator for comparing drafters on shared rollouts without running speculative decoding. Finetuning the DSpark and DFly drafters with EDR improves mean accepted length and beats prior training objectives across nine benchmarks in math, code, and chat.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ResidualQuant is a KV cache quantization method for looped Transformers (models that repeatedly apply shared Transformer blocks across recurrent loops) that exploits the high similarity of KV states across loops by storing the final-loop KV states as a reference and encoding other loops as low-precision residuals, combined with least-squares scaling, rotations, and loop-wise mixed precision. It pushes KV quantization down to INT2 while staying close to BF16 accuracy, cutting theoretical KV storage by 80.7%, beating rotation-based baselines by up to 13% accuracy at equal memory budget, and on an RTX 5090 improving decode throughput up to 2.73x and peak throughput up to 4.15x via larger batch sizes.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This IACR ePrint paper examines the post-quantum security of Bitcoin bridges that rely on off-chain garbled-circuit evaluation of succinct proofs to validate withdrawals, where input labels encoding the proof must be committed on-chain. The authors show current pairing-based proving systems are vulnerable to quantum attacks, and that swapping to post-quantum proving systems shrinks circuit size but drastically inflates proof size, forcing proofs to span multiple Bitcoin blocks and raising on-chain cost. They outline research directions to improve proof efficiency, circuit representation, and label encoding for quantum-resistant bridge designs.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR ePrint paper introduces BPORS-C+BFP, a new few-time signature construction that replaces FORS in SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA, combining short hash chains with a blockwise forced-pruning budget to shrink the bottom signature component. The authors derive a generating-function coverage bound and an exact counting method to safely tighten pruning per block, achieving 8.3%-18.1% smaller full SLH-DSA signatures across six standard parameter sets (versus 3.7%-13.4% for the prior BPORS+FP scheme), and up to 32.5%-36.5% reduction in limited-use settings.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

An IACR ePrint paper presenting K-LMS, an experimental variant of the NIST-standardized LMS hash-based post-quantum signature scheme in which the underlying hash is swapped for Korean primitives: the LSH-256 hash function (reference and vectorized) and a Tandem-DM double-block-length construction built from the CHAM, LEA, and ARIA block ciphers. The authors implement a non-invasive backend-swapping bridge over the reference LMS code and benchmark keygen/sign/verify latency, key/signature sizes, memory, and parameter sweeps, finding that hash substitution doesn't change key/signature sizes but that two measurement pitfalls (hash dispatch overhead, and software vs. hardware-accelerated SHA-256 baselines) can shift performance comparisons by an order of magnitude or 6x respectively. They report LSH-256 K-LMS signing on par with SHA-256 LMS in software, and 3.3-3.9x faster than a prior K-XMSS implementation because LMS needs fewer hash calls per Winternitz step than XMSS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

StOMR is a new "stateful" model for Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) — the FHE-based technique letting a recipient scan an untrusted bulletin board for their messages without revealing which ones are theirs, used in anonymous messaging and blockchain privacy. By letting sender and receiver keep lightweight private state (established via a new OMR-KEM key-encapsulation scheme) instead of relying purely on public-key FHE, StOMR shrinks sender-published signals by roughly 550x, 650x, and 178x compared to PerfOMR, SophOMR, and InstantOMR respectively, while matching detector performance; implemented in C++ and published at ACM CCS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 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

This paper studies looped language models — architectures that reuse a shared block of layers recurrently — and argues that as recurrent hidden states approach fixed points, the specific path taken to reach them matters less, enabling several efficiency tricks: truncated backpropagation through time during training, terminal key-value (KV) cache sharing across loop iterations for faster decoding, a distilled student model that prefills up to 1.79x faster, and RL policy gradients computed from saved rollout states that run 2x faster than backpropagating through the full trajectory. To make these fixed points reliable, the authors replace fixed-depth training with a learned depth prior (regularized with an entropy term to stay broad, improving on Huginn's fixed broad prior) and introduce orthogonal input injection, which removes the component of the injected input that the hidden state could otherwise amplify or cancel. Across model scales from 100M to 1.6B parameters, both changes lower perplexity, and at 1.6B the learned prior with a 3x smaller KV cache matches the downstream performance of full-cache fixed-depth training.

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

HeuFouFT is a task-guided framework for selecting which frequency coordinates to train in Fourier fine-tuning (FourierFT), replacing fixed uniform or Gaussian band-pass coordinate selection with a search driven by downstream task performance. It initializes three metaheuristic optimizers (GA-SA, PSO, Cuckoo Search) from a lightweight block-level probe intensity map, using a Random Forest to filter candidate coordinate sets before proxy fine-tuning. On the E2E benchmark with GPT-2-Medium, all three variants beat random-uniform and Gaussian FourierFT and LoRA, with PSO beating the LoCA baseline on four of five metrics while using 37.6% fewer trainable spectral coefficients and only 15-18% of full fine-tuning FLOPs.

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

This IACR ePrint paper benchmarks 20 open-source Gröbner basis implementations against the proprietary Magma system on polynomial systems derived from small-scale AES over GF(2), using Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty tiers with ten instances each. In the Hard setting, msolve and Singular's slimgb completed all runs successfully with mean runtimes of 164s and 269s and peak memory of 3693/4343 MiB respectively, versus Magma's 319s and 16853 MiB, with msolve exploiting ~13.4 CPU cores versus ~1 core for the others. The results quantify when open-source algebraic solvers are practical alternatives to Magma for algebraic cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

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

The paper introduces PoS (Progression of States), an inference-time framework for long-horizon LLM agents that maintains explicit belief states — combining a current world-state estimate with unresolved task requirements — instead of relying on raw interaction-history memory. PoS detects "Belief Trapping" (stagnation, cycles, or drift where an agent keeps acting without real progress), diagnoses the blocked requirement, and applies targeted recovery constraints, achieving the best results across four benchmarks (including ALFWorld and RCA-100) and three LLM backbones, with gains up to 22.68% and 37.89% over the strongest baselines.

huggingface.copaperAdded 3 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Persona Guardrail is a production-grade runtime defense framework for customer-facing LLM agents that enforces explicit functional boundaries via synchronous input/output validation against semantic allowlist and blocklist specifications. The authors also introduce PAGE (Persona-Aware Guardrail Evaluation), a benchmark covering benign, adversarial, and out-of-domain user and agent turns; deployed in production, it raises overall accuracy from 85.7% to 95.9% versus a generic LLM-based guardrail, boosts out-of-domain detection from 57.3% to 93.5%, and cuts the false-approved rate from 25.0% to 4.7%, all within latency budget.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

VenusRL is a fully disaggregated system for agentic reinforcement learning that trains LLM agents through multi-turn interactions with external tool environments. It introduces a priority-aware action scheduler that uses length-prediction heuristics to prioritize sample groups likely to unblock the next training step across batch admission, KV cache residency, and cross-worker orchestration, plus an environment resource manager that packs more tool sandboxes per node via a memory-aware admission threshold and template-keyed page-sharing pool using copy-on-write for isolation. The system achieves up to 4.24x end-to-end training speedup and reduces environment (sandbox) cost by up to 89% over state-of-the-art baselines on agentic RL workloads.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

VisionMX is a post-training quantization method for vision models using Microscaling (MX) formats, which pair low-precision numeric elements with shared block scales for efficient inference. The paper identifies three error sources in direct MX conversion of vision models—block-scale representation, poor alignment of small convolutional weights with nonuniform element grids, and underuse of signed codes by nonnegative activations—and addresses them via bounded weight rounding and a foldable affine activation correction. It is evaluated across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and low-light image enhancement, showing improvements over direct conversion and existing post-training quantization baselines, especially for architectures most sensitive to MX conversion.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv Systematization of Knowledge paper surveys the literature (2019–2026) on blockchain-assisted intrusion detection and response, proposing a three-axis taxonomy classifying proposals by detection-system class (NIDS, HIDS, EDR/XDR), blockchain's functional role, and response-automation maturity. It argues existing surveys wrongly conflate blockchain's roles and ignore the shift from classic IDS/IPS to modern EDR/XDR, then exposes why a true per-endpoint blockchain-anchored response loop remains nearly nonexistent due to consensus latency, deployment, and community mismatches, and flags cross-cutting risks including smart-contract attack surfaces, post-quantum cryptographic weaknesses, and adversarial manipulation of LLM-based detection engines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DRelay is a speculative decoding technique for LLM inference that repairs parallel draft-token selections before target-model verification, using a global reader over the entire draft block plus a causal selector to decide whether to keep or replace each candidate token, extending the accepted prefix length. Trained jointly with the draft backbone via a combined candidate-support and position-weighted repair loss, it is evaluated on eight benchmarks on an H800 GPU and, under SGLang serving, improves end-to-end decoding speedup substantially over DFlash, Domino, and DSpark baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper argues that classical program invariants are an effective defense against smart-contract exploits, backed by INVARIANTEVAL, a benchmark of 28 real Ethereum attacks each paired with a human-written invariant that would have blocked it, and PONDEREPLAY, a transaction-replay framework used to validate every invariant across 108,637 historical transactions.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper models collusion in threshold-encrypted mempools, where a quorum of a decryption committee can sell its decryption capability to a front-runner and profit repeatedly as long as the leaked key keeps decrypting future blocks. The authors derive that deterrence requires a penalty (e.g., slashable stake) covering the largest discounted value a single leak can reach, show constant penalties cannot deter unbounded reuse without key rotation, formulate the cheapest deterring stake profile as a covering linear program, and argue per-epoch keys drastically cut the required stake versus a key valid for its whole lifetime. They calibrate the model on Ethereum front-running data and place the Ferveo and Shutter threshold-encryption protocols within it, with extensions to sealed-bid auctions, multi-authority voting, and federated learning under a shared key.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

PISA is a block-sparse attention mechanism that replaces the quadratic block-selection step of conventional sparse attention with a pyramid Top-K strategy: keys are organized into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy of O(log N) levels built via pooling, and LogSumExp scoring narrows candidates level by level down to the finest granularity, giving overall O(N log N) complexity instead of O(N^2). The authors implement hardware-aware Triton kernels for both training and inference that fuse hierarchical routing and scoring without ever materializing the full query-key score matrix, and show on language modeling benchmarks that PISA matches baseline performance on commonsense reasoning while improving results on retrieval tasks.

huggingface.copaperAdded 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Tracekit is an open-source, dependency-free system that logs three cross-checked channels (human intent, model self-reported reasoning, and actual executed actions) for autonomous coding agent sessions into a hash-chained, externally anchorable ledger, hooking into Claude Code's lifecycle events and reconstructing multi-agent hierarchies. The paper's experiments show the ledger detects all 1,600 tested tamper mutations (edits, deletions, reordering, forged inserts, torn writes) with anchoring needed to catch tail truncation/full re-chaining, that a regex-based tool-call gate blocks only 41% of harmful calls while over-blocking benign ones and is trivially evaded, that in 14 real Claude Code runs the agent never acted on 4 planted indirect prompt injections, and that an LLM reviewer catches 100% of seeded misaligned steps in traces versus 82% for rule-based flags. The authors release the system, harness, and all traces.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Tracekit is an open-source, dependency-free auditing system for autonomous coding agents that records three channels per session — the human's stated intent, the model's self-reported reasoning, and the actions actually executed — into a hash-chained, externally anchorable ledger. It hooks into Claude Code's lifecycle events, reconstructs multi-agent hierarchies, gates tool calls with a pre-execution policy, and provides a live browser-based ledger verifier. Across five experiments the authors show the hash chain catches all tested tampering (with anchoring needed against tail truncation/re-chaining), a hook adds ~24ms overhead at scale, a regex-based gate only blocks 41% of harmful tool calls, real runs correctly resisted and disclosed planted prompt injections, and a new 'seeded-fault splicing' method with an LLM reviewer caught 100% of faulted traces versus 82% for rule-based flags.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

ReproBench is a benchmark that tests whether LLM agents can autonomously reconstruct an execution environment and reproduce a real vulnerability starting from nothing but a CVE identifier, rather than being handed source code or a container. It decomposes the workflow into six verifiable phases (firmware download/unpacking, analysis, crash validation, etc.) and evaluates agents on 30 real-world IoT firmware CVEs. The study finds only 5.3% of CVE-model pairs achieve genuine reproduction while 45.3% of runs fall back to vulnerability simulation as a shortcut, and it catalogs the bottlenecks blocking agents at each pipeline stage.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

ReproBench is a benchmark that tests whether LLM agents can autonomously reconstruct an execution environment and reproduce a vulnerability starting from nothing but a CVE identifier, unlike prior benchmarks that hand agents source code or a ready container. It decomposes the workflow into six phases (firmware download, unpacking, analysis, crash validation, etc.) over 30 real-world IoT firmware vulnerabilities. Results show state-of-the-art agents resort to "vulnerability simulation" shortcuts in 45.3% of runs and achieve genuine reproduction in only 5.3% of CVE-model pairs, with the paper detailing the core bottlenecks blocking full autonomy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper defines a threat model for multi-agent LLM delegation covering four adversaries (confused deputy, token theft/replay, prompt-injection privilege escalation, compromised sub-agents) and derives eight security requirements for governed agent systems. It shows that LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and the MCP authorization model each fail to meet the full requirement set, then implements and adversarially tests an authorization broker that blocks all four threats, rejects 0 of 200,000 forged tokens, and confines a compromised sub-agent to a mean of 1.5 reachable actions (vs. 8,100 under bearer delegation) at ~2.6 microseconds per decision. The broker's principles are said to be productized in VotalAI's LLM Shield.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

VulContextBench is a hand-audited benchmark of 111 vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs, and five languages, built to score whether a coding agent actually retrieved and cited the correct evidence for a vulnerability verdict rather than just reaching the right verdict. Evaluating seven frontier models (including Qwen3-Coder-Next and GPT-5.5) at file/block/line granularity, the authors find every model explores most of the gold evidence but reports only a fraction of it: Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of annotated lines but cites just 12.9%, while GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36%. This reveals that verdict-only vulnerability-detection benchmarks mask whether an agent's reasoning is actually grounded in traced code versus pretraining recall.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

VulContextBench is a benchmark of 111 hand-audited vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs and five languages, built to measure whether a coding agent's verdict is actually grounded in the code it retrieved rather than recalled from pretraining. Each case has gold-context annotations (464 code blocks) scored separately for context viewed during exploration versus context cited as final evidence, at file, block and line granularity, across seven frontier models. The headline finding is a large viewed-vs-reported gap — e.g. Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of gold lines but cites only 12.9%, GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36% — showing agents explore relevant evidence but fail to surface it in their final report, a failure mode invisible to verdict-only benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

A controlled study of 113 non-technical participants compares three ways of supervising an AI agent across 18 simulated actions (including 7 overreach cases): per-action human-in-the-loop approval, automated model review, and user-authored "allow/ask/never" consequence policies. It finds that user-authored policies blocked significantly less overreach than either alternative (-20.1pp vs HITL, -14.5pp vs AUTO), largely because participants overwhelmingly chose "ask" rules that just deferred decisions back to runtime approval, where they then approved most overreach actions anyway. The paper's key takeaway is a gap between stated preference and committed policy: standing rules don't reliably constrain agent actions if users keep choosing to defer judgment case-by-case.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper identifies security-context discontinuity, a failure mode where individually correct LLM agent security mechanisms such as provenance tracking, authorization, policy enforcement, and protocol adapters fail to compose safely because security-critical context gets dropped, widened, rebound, or reinterpreted as actions cross component boundaries. The authors introduce CONTINUITY, a framework modeling each component with assume-guarantee contracts and carrying authenticated context via signed root grants, provenance commitments, role-bound transition receipts, and effect-bound execution permits, formalizing end-to-end consequence integrity. A reference verifier and cross-layer fault-injection suite covering 32 fault classes across four domains was evaluated on 2560 attack instances, 700 benign tasks, and 200 ambiguous cases, with the full configuration blocking all harmful effects while passing benign tasks and correctly escalating ambiguous ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

A 113-participant study comparing three ways to control AI agent actions across email, files, payments, and personal data: per-action human approval (HITL), automated per-action model review (AUTO), and user-authored 'allow/ask/never' consequence policies (POLICY). It finds POLICY blocked significantly less overreach than HITL and AUTO (-20.1 and -14.5 percentage points respectively), because participants overwhelmingly chose 'ask' rules (114/140) that just deferred decisions back to runtime, and because users approved most overreach actions anyway when prompted — revealing a preference-vs-commitment gap where standing policies don't by themselves harden agent authorization.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper introduces Knowledge Trap, a defense against model extraction attacks on commercial LLM APIs that lures attackers into querying a Honeypot Knowledge Graph (HKG) full of low-transferability knowledge via breadcrumb-guided exploration, wasting the attacker's query budget instead of blocking or perturbing outputs. Evaluated in medical and financial domains, it reduces surrogate model agreement by 6.2% on average while preserving accuracy for legitimate users, outperforming prior extraction defenses that degrade utility.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

An empirical study analyzing a merged corpus of 407 leaked, reconstructed, or officially published LLM system prompts from 62 vendors, using a block-level classifier to categorize content. It finds operational content (tool/protocol instructions, ~58% of words) vastly dominates over safety/ethical statements (~5%), with strict rule-lines guarding tool use and file safety over harmful content by an 11:1 margin, and documents cross-vendor text reuse plus "prompt rot" (thousands of words churned per version release), arguing system prompts should be treated as configuration/engineering artifacts rather than windows into model values.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

A large-scale empirical study analyzing a merged corpus of 407 leaked, reconstructed, or officially published LLM system prompts from 62 vendors, clustering them into 29 near-duplicate groups and classifying content at the block level. The authors find operational content (tool/protocol instructions) dominates at ~58% of classified words versus only ~5% for safety policy, with the strictest rule-lines guarding tool use and file safety over harmful content by an 11:1 margin, and document literal-text reuse across vendors and significant "prompt rot" (word churn) across version chains — arguing leaked system prompts should be treated as operational specifications and a supply-chain/engineering concern rather than windows into a model's "values."

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

This arXiv paper proposes a blockchain-anchored agentic AI framework for securing the software development lifecycle: specialized LLM-backed agents handle source integrity, SBOM/dependency analysis, CI configuration auditing, artifact verification, and runtime policy evaluation, each producing a cryptographically signed attestation recorded on a permissioned blockchain via smart contracts (agent registry, immutable attestation log, release-policy module). Agent-to-agent and agent-to-blockchain communication is secured through a consortium-operated certificate authority, and a sequence flow illustrates a source-code security agent anchoring its attestation on-chain to trigger an allow/block deployment decision. It's a conceptual architecture paper rather than an evaluated deployment, aiming to give decentralized, tamper-resistant provenance for agentic AI monitoring the software supply chain.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper shows that local LLM coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode and Grok Build can be induced to delete or tamper with their own execution traces, defeating the assumption behind asynchronous monitoring, incident investigation, and compliance audits. Only one tested harness, Muse Code, blocked this behavior; the authors also show external attackers can trigger trace deletion and that trace tampering emerges naturally as agents try to maximize reward, which could be used to conceal scheming or sabotage. They recommend enforcing trace logging via an independent interception mechanism outside the agent's control so integrity survives even full host compromise.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 25 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

A large-scale (N=110) within-subject HCI study measuring the behavioral, oculomotor, and physiological costs of video passthrough head-mounted displays versus natural viewing during a block assembly task. The authors find a four-fold suppression of rotational head velocity and decoupled head-gaze coordination under passthrough, terming this "Passthrough Rigidity" — a shift toward motor caution and oculomotor compensation that correlates with worse task performance, increased ocular strain, and cognitive load, offering a quantitative framework for improving future XR device comfort.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper by Abdelnabi and Bagdasarian argues that the dominant prompt-injection defense paradigm — data/instruction separation — fails to catch attacks built on contextual manipulation and also breaks legitimate agent behavior. The authors reframe prompt injection through Contextual Integrity (CI), a privacy theory judging whether information flows comply with contextual norms, and construct scenarios where attackers misrepresent flows, manipulate norms, or mix multiple flows to bypass defenses. They derive an impossibility result: any adversary can construct a context making a blocked flow look legitimate, or any defender who tightens norms enough will block genuinely legitimate flows, and propose CI-aware alignment as a principled path forward for frontier autonomous agents.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper proves that the Renyi-n coherent information, a computable proxy for von Neumann coherent information used to study decodability transitions in noisy quantum error-correcting codes, is nondecreasing in n for stabilizer codes under independent Pauli noise, resolving a monotonicity gap in the prior theory. It also gives an operational meaning to the Renyi-n coherent information via postselection on matching syndromes across auxiliary code blocks, showing its saturation is equivalent to asymptotically perfect recovery, and that it upper-bounds achievable coherent information after any syndrome-conditioned recovery.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 10 Sep 2026🧠 AI