Papers for

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.

Benchmark evaluates forgetting ability of deployed ai agents

K-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM Unlearning in Agentic Deployments

Abstract: Unlearning benchmarks such as TOFU and MUSE certify forgetting by reading the model's final answer, where a model that refuses to answer already counts as having forgotten. We show that this model-level certificate does not transfer once the model is deployed as an agent. We introduce K-Bench, a benchmark that scores LLM unlearning under agentic deployment. K-Bench inspects all six channels a ReAct agent exposes, including its chain-of-thought (CoT), tool calls and tool observations, and elicited summary. A query counts as leaked if the secret appears in any of them. Each experiment places the secret in exactly one of the agent's three sources (the weights, the prompt, or the retrieval store). The K-Score is computed separately for each source and credits forgetting only when the agent remains usable. Clearing the answer channel does not make the secret unrecoverable. On structured retrieval, the secret stays verbatim in the tool-observation channel and the aggregate leak rate is unchanged. When the secret lives in the prompt or the retrieval store, TOFU and MUSE report no leakage, while the deployed agent still leaks it on 22--86\% of queries. When the secret is in the weights, none of the twenty evaluated published methods demonstrably removes it, and only an input-corruption intervention reaches selective forgetting under the evaluated observer. The top-ranked method changes across base models. A refusal-tuning method resists the evaluated extraction without verified knowledge removal.

Fri 11 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Sometimes, AI models need to forget certain secret information to protect privacy or security. Traditional tests say a model has forgotten the secret if it refuses to answer questions about it. This paper shows that once the AI model is used as a more complex agent with many communication parts, simply refusing to answer isn't enough to prove forgetting. The authors created K-Bench, which carefully checks all the ways these AI agents share information to see if secrets still leak. They found that many current methods do not fully prevent the agent from leaking secret information during real use.
Open 2609.12808v1

Influence-based image tweaks do not enable reliable machine unlearning

Do Influence-Derived Data Perturbations Enable Machine Unlearning? A Controlled Study of Three Plausible Roles

Abstract: We evaluate Deep Perturbation Learning (DPL), which perturbs training images and labels along influence-derived directions, in three roles in which prior work has positioned it for machine unlearning: a direct deletion signal (the strongest claim), a utility-preserving regularizer, and a warm start for adversarial unlearning. Evidence for the weaker roles has been used to support the stronger one, so we test each role separately under a matched protocol with exact-seed retraining baselines. An audit of the public implementation identifies two correctness issues: image directions are computed on augmented, normalized tensors but applied to raw images, and the label perturbation falls below float32 resolution, leaving labels unchanged. After correcting the image-perturbation pipeline, DPL fails the direct-deletion criterion on CIFAR-10/ResNet-18 in all three paired seeds. Its utility effects are inconsistent in sign across seeds, and once direction-computation time is counted it underperforms simple warm-start baselines. A one-seed Tiny ImageNet check likewise does not favor DPL as a regularizer or warm start; preprocessing inconsistencies in the released code make the direct comparison there inconclusive. These results cover random instance deletion only and do not rule out influence-based methods in other deletion regimes. We release a role-matched evaluation protocol and an audit checklist for perturbation-based deletion claims.

Fri 11 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Machine unlearning means making a trained AI forget specific data it learned from. This paper studies a method called Deep Perturbation Learning (DPL), which changes training images and labels in specific ways to make the AI forget data. The authors find that DPL does not work well for making the AI forget data directly, nor does it consistently help keep the AI's performance good or speed up other forgetting methods. They also fix bugs in the original DPL code that affected results and show that previous claims about DPL’s power need careful re-examination. Their work applies only when deleting random data points and does not rule out other methods.
Open 2609.12313v1

IPv6 hitlist service improves finding targets over 10 years

IPv6 Hitlist Service: Lessons Learned From 10 Years of Operation

Abstract: After becoming an Internet Draft more than 30 years ago, IPv6 has seen an increase in deployment and use in the past years. As measurements in the IPv6 Internet require new approaches due to the vastly larger address space, hitlists have come along as one possible source for finding IPv6 targets. One of the most prominent hitlists is provided by the IPv6 Hitlist Service. In this paper, we share insights from 10 years of operations of the IPv6 Hitlist Service: We show different evolutions of the service, highlighting important changes along the way. To better understand the representativeness of the hitlist, we perform a coverage analysis using real-world traffic data from a major central European ISP and Tier-1 network, finding that at least one address is known to the IPv6 Hitlist Service for 87.1 % of ASes and 56.5 % of /48 prefixes originating IPv6 traffic. We also share results from a conducted user survey and analyze users accessing the IPv6 Hitlist Service, finding diverse use cases and access patterns across time (e.g., one-off vs. continuous downloads) and available data (e.g., all vs. responsive addresses). Finally, we provide best practice recommendations when working with the hitlist and share lessons learned during its 10-year operation.

Thu 10 SeptNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Finding devices on the Internet using IPv6 addresses is harder because there are so many possible addresses. The authors discuss a service that collects known IPv6 addresses to help researchers and engineers find targets more easily. Over 10 years, this service has collected addresses covering most networks that use IPv6 traffic. They studied how well the service reflects real-world use and how different people use the data. The paper shares lessons learned and advice for working with this IPv6 address list.
Open 2609.11475v1

Toxicrag exposes risks of poisoning retrieval-augmented language models

ToxicRAG: Compromising Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Single-Shot Knowledge Poisoning Attacks

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can ground large language model (LLM) outputs in external evidence, but it also exposes the system to knowledge poisoning. Representative attacks use multiple injected documents or templates that directly assert a target answer. We present ToxicRAG, a one-document-per-target attack that expresses misinformation as a coherent knowledge-update narrative. The generated document first acknowledges the previously accepted answer, introduces fabricated events that appear to invalidate it, and then attributes the attacker-selected answer to a set of purported authorities. An answer-focused self-validation loop optionally revises a candidate when a surrogate language model does not reproduce the target answer. We evaluate the attack on 100 target questions from each of Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MS-MARCO, using four victim LLMs and four dense retrievers. In the sampled-corpus setting reported in this paper, ToxicRAG obtains ASRs between 0.61 and 0.91 across the twelve dataset--model combinations. It matches or exceeds the strongest evaluated baseline in every combination, with margins ranging from 0 to 11 percentage points. These results show that narrative-form poisoned documents can remain influential under the evaluated RAG configurations and motivate further study of factual consistency and source provenance in RAG systems.

Thu 10 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Some systems use external documents to help generate answers, but this approach can be tricked by fake information. This paper shows how an attacker can insert just one carefully crafted fake document that tells a persuasive story including false facts to change the system’s answer. The attack works by first agreeing with the old answer, then adding made-up events and citing fake experts to push a wrong answer. The authors tested this on various models and datasets and found the attack often succeeds, showing a new way misinformation can spread through these systems.
Open 2609.11082v1

Agent Incident registry helps track AI agent failures and harms

The Agent Incident Registry: Toward Preventing Repeated AI Agent Failures

Abstract: AI agents increasingly act through tools and delegated authority, but general incident repositories rarely capture the mechanisms needed to compare public failures with agent-security evaluations. We present the Agent Incident Registry (AIR), a source-linked catalog containing \N{} records of agent-related events disclosed from \Yfirst{} through \Ylast{}. Each record includes supporting evidence, a stable identifier, and missingness-aware labels for causal role, disclosure class, mechanism, and outcome. Among the \Nprimary{} generative-system records in which the agent acted, \Rprimary{} involved realized harm (\Pprimary\%). Realized outcomes concentrate in in-the-wild and safety-failure records, while responsible disclosures and research demonstrations are overwhelmingly demonstrated; the aggregate share therefore characterizes collection composition rather than deployment risk. After initial curation, a second human reviewer checked all \N{} records and their existing labels for completeness and correctness. In a deployment-analogue audit, InjecAgent's \NInjecAgentCases{} cases occupy three of AIR's twelve surfaces and are all attacker-triggered, whereas AIR contains \Nsafety{} no-adversary safety failures. AIR supports source-grounded case retrieval and evaluation-scope auditing, not failure-rate or control-efficacy estimation.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
AI agents sometimes fail, causing harm or security problems. The authors created the Agent Incident Registry, a detailed catalog of past AI agent failures with evidence and labels about how and why they happened. This registry helps people find real-world examples and compare incidents to improve safety. It does not estimate how often failures happen or how well controls work.
Open 2609.11030v1

E-branchformer improves audio deepfake detection with local and global features

Disentangled Global-Local Feature Learning with E-Branchformer for Audio Deepfake Detection

Abstract: The rapid advancement of voice synthesis technologies such as text-to-speech and voice conversion poses significant threats to speech-based authentication systems, necessitating robust deepfake detection methods. In this work, we propose a novel E-Branchformer-based architecture that effectively leverages self-supervised speech representations for audio deepfake detection. Our model employs parallel branches to simultaneously capture global contextual dependencies through multi-head self-attention and local temporal patterns through convolutional processing. To enhance discriminative capability, we integrate depthwise convolution and Squeeze-and-Excitation modules that enrich the classification token with refined patch token information after feature merging. Extensive experiments on ASVspoof 2021 LA, DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with equal error rates of 0.88%, 1.85%, and 6.30% respectively, substantially outperforming existing methods. Comprehensive ablation studies validate that the dual-branch architecture provides complementary discriminative information, Squeeze-and-Excitation Aggregation significantly improves SSL feature integration, and the combination of DWConv and SE modules is critical for effective class token enhancement. The superior performance on real-world scenarios demonstrates strong generalization capability to diverse acoustic conditions and unseen spoofing attacks.

Tue 8 SeptSound
The gist
Voice cloning technology can trick systems that recognize real human voices. This paper presents a new tool called E-Branchformer that listens to audio and checks if it is fake or not. It looks at the sound in two ways at the same time—catching the overall picture and the small details. Tests show this method works better than previous ones on different collections of voice recordings. The design helps it detect fake voices even in new, tricky situations.
Open 2609.08948v1

Ipv6 address finding methods tested with shared evaluation system

6SEVEN: System for EValuating IPv6 ENumeration algorithms

Abstract: The vast, sparsely populated, and often ephemeral IPv6 address space makes discovering active addresses challenging. In response, the community has developed over thirty different IPv6 Target Generation Algorithms (TGAs). TGAs learn addressing structure from seed (training) datasets, build a representative model, and generate candidate addresses. Unfortunately, the existing literature employs a wide variety of input seeds, data cleansing, and metrics of success that prevent ready comparison. Toward making TGA evaluation consistent, we present 6SEVEN, an extensible framework that hosts TGAs as plugins and links them to shared data cleaning, probing, dealiasing, and result tabulation components. We port as 6SEVEN plugins eight popular TGAs and demonstrate a controlled case study. Our results show that the performance of these TGAs varies substantially due to factors independent of the main algorithm---especially the seed set composition, dealiasing, and tabulation procedures. We observe tradeoffs between desirable features of TGA performance, including yield and exploration. We envision 6SEVEN as an enabling community resource to advance the science of current and future TGAs, and, by extension, IPv6 measurement.

Tue 8 SeptNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Finding active internet addresses in IPv6 is hard because the address space is huge and mostly empty. Many techniques exist to guess which addresses might be active, but comparing these methods has been difficult due to inconsistent testing. The authors created 6SEVEN, a system that lets multiple guessing methods be tested fairly using the same data and criteria. They showed that differences in results often come from factors other than the main guessing method, like the choice of initial data and how results are counted. This system aims to help people improve how internet addresses are discovered in the future.
Open 2609.08098v1

MOLE benchmark detects hidden insider threats in AI agent accounts

MOLE: Detecting Insider Threats in AI Agents

Abstract: Model misalignment, prompt injection, or operator misuse could lead AI agents operating frontier-lab accounts to exfiltrate model weights, poison training data, or weaken release gates. Existing benchmarks do not test whether defenders can detect this activity among routine work under a limited review budget. We introduce MOLE, an open benchmark of 150 AI-operated accounts sharing 9 stateful services over 30 workdays, with 12 threats and 8 corpora from four models totaling roughly 20 billion tokens. Of 39 agent models, 72% complete most assigned harmful objectives and agent refusal does not predict completion. MOLE enables comparison of 40 monitors across corpus generators, observability levels, and threats; even the best evaluated monitor in our single-day audit-event comparison misses nearly half of completed harm. MOLE also enables monitor development: benchmark-guided search improves a mid-tier monitor by 49-64%, while selective use of a stronger monitor improves budget-AUC by 10% over applying it to every account-day at comparable modeled cost.

Mon 7 SeptMachine LearningComputation and LanguageCryptography and Security
The gist
AI programs meant to do helpful tasks can sometimes be tricked or misused to do harmful things, like stealing or messing up data. Existing tests don’t check well if people watching these AI accounts can spot bad behavior with limited time and resources. The authors created MOLE, a large test set simulating many AI accounts with real activity and potential threats, to see how well monitors detect harmful actions. They found even the best monitors miss a lot of issues, but using MOLE to guide improvements helps detection. This tool helps improve safety checks for AI running in complex environments.
Open 2609.06966v1