Papers for
security operation centers
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.
Fine-tuning language models can reawaken hidden privacy risks
Sleeping Secrets: How Fine-Tuning Reawakens Privacy Risks in Language Models
Abstract: Beyond adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized applications, fine-tuning has recently been shown to recover private information that is no longer accessible through direct queries. Previous fine-tuning recovery attacks, however, require genuine private supervision drawn from the same distribution, i.e., the previous training dataset. We argue that such recovery remains possible without such impractical knowledge. We show that LLM-generated candidates can provide sufficient supervision to recover previously learned private associations. Based on this, we propose ReGap, a data-free attack that recovers private associations using task structure, filters them by answer-token likelihood, and updates the target model via low-rank adaptation. Specifically, ReGap requires neither target answers nor auxiliary genuine private supervision. Across six GPT-2, OPT, and Qwen3 models, ReGap improves target-association recovery by 6-21 percentage points over the post-training target model. Recovery remains substantial even when the adaptation identities are disjoint from all memorized and evaluation identities, with no exact target answers appearing in the generated or selected supervision. Moreover, the same trained adapters increase recovery from 42\% to 63\% on a previously exposed checkpoint, but produce no gain on a matched checkpoint that never encountered the targets. This contrast shows that adaptation alone is insufficient to explain the observed recovery and that prior target exposure strongly affects post-adaptation recoverability. Our findings highlight that routine model customization can reawaken latent privacy risks, warranting urgent attention from the academic and industrial communities.
Black-box testing reveals major risks in autonomous AI agents
Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Abstract: Agentic systems are rapidly moving to production, where they read untrusted inputs, call tools with real permissions, and act autonomously, expanding the security surface beyond chat-only models. Yet standard evaluations remain single-turn and fail to capture multi-step agent vulnerabilities. We present a systematic black-box framework for risk-aware agent evaluation requiring only basic system descriptions. Our approach introduces: (1) a seven-domain taxonomy mapping observable behaviors to risk categories, (2) fully automated SAGE-RT red teaming producing 120 adversarial scenarios per domain, and (3) human-validated evaluation using LLM judges. Empirical validation across two agent architectures (CrewAI and AutoGen) with four base models reveals alarming patterns: 56.25\% average governance risk, 65\% privacy risk in multi-agent configurations, and agent behavior vulnerabilities reaching 85\%. Our black-box approach effectively identifies critical architectural vulnerabilities without privileged access, providing a scalable path toward safer agent deployments.