Papers for

api security teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Statistical auditing method measures identity risk of released text

Conformal Privacy Auditing: Calibrated Re-identification Attacks with Statistical Guarantees

Abstract: Empirical identity leakage from released text is increasingly driven by attackers that combine large language models (LLMs) with auxiliary knowledge to link documents to individuals. Existing audits typically report success rates for specific attack pipelines but lack finite-sample statistical guarantees, while training-time protections such as differential privacy are difficult to translate into release-time decisions for individual natural-language documents. We introduce Conformal Privacy Auditing(CPA), a distribution-free calibration framework that provides a statistical certificate of re-identification risk for each released document against LLM-empowered adversaries. CPA outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with user-chosen confidence under exchangeability, together with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from set size. CPA supports both logit-access and sampling-only attackers, enabling audits of open-source models and proprietary API models in a unified framework. Across multiple release benchmarks and attacker configurations, CPA achieves calibrated coverage and reveals sharp shifts in certified identifiability as auxiliary knowledge, LLM augmentation, and release mechanisms vary, providing a statistically grounded basis for reporting and comparing release-time linkage risk across attacker configurations, datasets, and release mechanisms alike.

Fri 18 SeptCryptography and SecurityComputation and Language
The gist
Text documents released online can reveal who wrote them when attackers use powerful language AI and extra information to guess identities. The authors created a method called Conformal Privacy Auditing that gives a statistical guarantee on whether an identity guess is correct for each document. This method works with different kinds of AI models and helps figure out how risky it is to share certain texts. It shows when the chance of being identified goes up or down depending on how the text is prepared and what extra information attackers have.
Open → 2609.21340v1

Provider-side attacks inflate large language model outputs and costs

The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services

Abstract: In pay-per-token LLM services, the more a model says, the more users pay. Dishonest providers can covertly manipulate generation to inflate output tokens while largely preserving task utility. We define such manipulation as a Provider-Side Token Inflation Attack (PTIA) and instantiate five representative attacks at the query, prompt, representation, and model levels of the provider-controlled pipeline. Our experiments show that each attack increases mean output length to more than 10.2x the clean baseline, demonstrating PTIA's financial appeal and feasibility at multiple stages of generation. Yet auditing PTIA from black-box responses is difficult for users. Our key observation is PTIA saturation: an initial attack sharply lengthens output, but further strengthening or composition has much less effect. We trace this saturation to stopping behavior: an initial PTIA sharply lowers the end-of-sequence token probability, whereas further intervention lowers it only marginally. Building on this insight, we design a lightweight single-probe audit that applies a controlled lengthening intervention. Under PTIA, the probe induces far fewer additional tokens than under normal service. The audit requires neither a trusted local reference model nor historical clean responses, and its separately issued original and probed requests resemble ordinary traffic, making evasion difficult. Across four open-weight models, it achieves an average detection rate of 85.1% with false-positive rates below 2%. Across 15 real LLM API services, the audit flags 7 for PTIA-consistent behavior.

Thu 17 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
In some language model services, users pay based on how many words the model generates. The authors found that some providers might secretly increase the length of responses to make users pay more, without clearly changing helpfulness. They designed several ways this can be done and showed it’s practical. They also created a simple test that can detect when such manipulations happen, even without knowing the original clean response. When tested on multiple models and real services, this test flagged several services likely inflating output length.
Open → 2609.20370v1