Vulnerability detection is the process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software applications or systems.
Time series anomaly detection is a critical task across various industrial domains. However, capturing temporal dependencies and multivariate correlations within patch-level representation learning remains underexplored, and reliance on single-scale patterns limits the detection of anomalies across different temporal ranges. Furthermore, focusing on normal data representations makes models vulnerable to distribution shifts at inference time. To address these limitations, we propose Codebook-based Online-adaptive Multi-scale Embedding for Time-series anomaly detection (COMET), which consists of three key components: (1) Multi-scale Patch Encoding captures temporal dependencies and inter-variable correlations across multiple patch scales. (2) Vector-Quantized Coreset learns representative normal patterns via codebook and detects anomalies with a dual-score combining quantization error and memory distance. (3) Online Codebook Adaptation generates pseudo-labels based on codebook entries and dynamically adapts the model at inference through contrastive learning. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that COMET achieves the best performance in 36 out of 45 evaluation metrics, validating its effectiveness across diverse environments.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting cybersecurity tasks, yet existing approaches struggle with automatic vulnerability discovery and exploitation due to limited interaction, weak execution grounding, and a lack of experience reuse. We propose Co-RedTeam, a security-aware multi-agent framework designed to mirror real-world red-teaming workflows by integrating security-domain knowledge, code-aware analysis, execution-grounded iterative reasoning, and long-term memory. Co-RedTeam decomposes vulnerability analysis into coordinated discovery and exploitation stages, enabling agents to plan, execute, validate, and refine actions based on real execution feedback while learning from prior trajectories. Extensive evaluations on challenging security benchmarks demonstrate that Co-RedTeam consistently outperforms strong baselines across diverse backbone models, achieving over 60% success rate in vulnerability exploitation and over 10% absolute improvement in vulnerability detection. Ablation and iteration studies further confirm the critical role of execution feedback, structured interaction, and memory for building robust and generalizable cybersecurity agents.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit spurious correlations in learned reward models to achieve high scores while violating human intent. Existing mitigations rely on static defenses that cannot adapt to novel exploitation strategies. We propose Adversarial Reward Auditing (ARA), a framework that reconceptualizes reward hacking as a dynamic, competitive game. ARA operates in two stages: first, a Hacker policy discovers reward model vulnerabilities while an Auditor learns to detect exploitation from latent representations; second, Auditor-Guided RLHF (AG-RLHF) gates reward signals to penalize detected hacking, transforming reward hacking from an unobservable failure into a measurable, controllable signal. Experiments across three hacking scenarios demonstrate that ARA achieves the best alignment-utility tradeoff among all baselines: reducing sycophancy to near-SFT levels while improving helpfulness, decreasing verbosity while achieving the highest ROUGE-L, and suppressing code gaming while improving Pass@1. Beyond single-domain evaluation, we show that reward hacking, detection, and mitigation all generalize across domains -- a Hacker trained on code gaming exhibits increased sycophancy despite no reward for this behavior, and an Auditor trained on one domain effectively suppresses exploitation in others, enabling efficient multi-domain defense with a single model.
Vision language models (VLMs) extend the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to cross-modal settings, yet remain highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. Existing defenses predominantly rely on safety fine-tuning or aggressive token manipulations, incurring substantial training costs or significantly degrading utility. Recent research shows that LLMs inherently recognize unsafe content in text, and the incorporation of visual inputs in VLMs frequently dilutes risk-related signals. Motivated by this, we propose Risk Awareness Injection (RAI), a lightweight and training-free framework for safety calibration that restores LLM-like risk recognition by amplifying unsafe signals in VLMs. Specifically, RAI constructs an Unsafe Prototype Subspace from language embeddings and performs targeted modulation on selected high-risk visual tokens, explicitly activating safety-critical signals within the cross-modal feature space. This modulation restores the model's LLM-like ability to detect unsafe content from visual inputs, while preserving the semantic integrity of original tokens for cross-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple jailbreak and utility benchmarks demonstrate that RAI substantially reduces attack success rate without compromising task performance.
Level crossing accidents remain a significant safety concern in modern railway systems, particularly under adverse weather conditions that degrade sensor performance. This review surveys state-of-the-art sensor technologies and fusion strategies for obstacle detection at railway level crossings, with a focus on robustness, detection accuracy, and environmental resilience. Individual sensors such as inductive loops, cameras, radar, and LiDAR offer complementary strengths but involve trade-offs, including material dependence, reduced visibility, and limited resolution in harsh environments. We analyze each modality's working principles, weather-induced vulnerabilities, and mitigation strategies, including signal enhancement and machine-learning-based denoising. We further review multi-sensor fusion approaches, categorized as data-level, feature-level, and decision-level architectures, that integrate complementary information to improve reliability and fault tolerance. The survey concludes with future research directions, including adaptive fusion algorithms, real-time processing pipelines, and weather-resilient datasets to support the deployment of intelligent, fail-safe detection systems for railway safety.
Security vulnerabilities often arise unintentionally during development due to a lack of security expertise and code complexity. Traditional tools, such as static and dynamic analysis, detect vulnerabilities only after they are introduced in code, leading to costly remediation. This work explores a proactive strategy to prevent vulnerabilities by highlighting code regions that implement security-critical functionality -- such as data access, authentication, and input handling -- and providing guidance for their secure implementation. We present an IntelliJ IDEA plugin prototype that uses code-level software metrics to identify potentially security-critical methods and large language models (LLMs) to generate prevention-oriented explanations. Our initial evaluation on the Spring-PetClinic application shows that the selected metrics identify most known security-critical methods, while an LLM provides actionable, prevention-focused insights. Although these metrics capture structural properties rather than semantic aspects of security, this work lays the foundation for code-level security-aware metrics and enhanced explanations.
Modern vehicles rely on electronic control units (ECUs) interconnected through the Controller Area Network (CAN), making in-vehicle communication a critical security concern. Machine learning (ML)-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are increasingly deployed to protect CAN traffic, yet their robustness against adversarial manipulation remains largely unexplored. We present a systematic adversarial evaluation of CAN IDS using the ROAD dataset, comparing four shallow learning models with a deep neural network-based detector. Using protocol-compliant, payload-level perturbations generated via FGSM, BIM and PGD, we evaluate adversarial effects on both benign and malicious CAN frames. While all models achieve strong baseline performance under benign conditions, adversarial perturbations reveal substantial vulnerabilities. Although shallow and deep models are robust to false-alarm induction, with the deep neural network (DNN) performing best on benign traffic, all architectures suffer significant increases in missed attacks. Notably, under gradient-based attacks, the shallow model extra trees (ET) demonstrates improved robustness to missed-attack induction compared to the other models. Our results demonstrate that adversarial manipulation can simultaneously trigger false alarms and evade detection, underscoring the need for adversarial robustness evaluation in safety-critical automotive IDS.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to Prompt Injection (PI) attacks, where adversarial instructions hidden within retrieved contexts hijack the model's execution flow. Current defenses typically face a critical trade-off: prevention-based fine-tuning often degrades general utility via the "alignment tax", while detection-based filtering incurs prohibitive latency and memory costs. To bridge this gap, we propose RedVisor, a unified framework that synthesizes the explainability of detection systems with the seamless integration of prevention strategies. To the best of our knowledge, RedVisor is the first approach to leverage fine-grained reasoning paths to simultaneously detect attacks and guide the model's safe response. We implement this via a lightweight, removable adapter positioned atop the frozen backbone. This adapter serves a dual function: it first generates an explainable analysis that precisely localizes the injection and articulates the threat, which then explicitly conditions the model to reject the malicious command. Uniquely, the adapter is active only during this reasoning phase and is effectively muted during the subsequent response generation. This architecture yields two distinct advantages: (1) it mathematically preserves the backbone's original utility on benign inputs; and (2) it enables a novel KV Cache Reuse strategy, eliminating the redundant prefill computation inherent to decoupled pipelines. We further pioneer the integration of this defense into the vLLM serving engine with custom kernels. Experiments demonstrate that RedVisor outperforms state-of-the-art defenses in detection accuracy and throughput while incurring negligible utility loss.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in interactive and retrieval-augmented systems, but they remain vulnerable to task drift; deviations from a user's intended instruction due to injected secondary prompts. Recent work has shown that linear probes trained on activation deltas of LLMs' hidden layers can effectively detect such drift. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of these detectors against adversarially optimised suffixes. We generate universal suffixes that cause poisoned inputs to evade detection across multiple probes simultaneously. Our experiments on Phi-3 3.8B and Llama-3 8B show that a single suffix can achieve high attack success rates; up to 93.91% and 99.63%, respectively, when all probes must be fooled, and nearly perfect success (>90%) under majority vote setting. These results demonstrate that activation delta-based task drift detectors are highly vulnerable to adversarial suffixes, highlighting the need for stronger defences against adaptive attacks. We also propose a defence technique where we generate multiple suffixes and randomly append one of them to the prompts while making forward passes of the LLM and train logistic regression models with these activations. We found this approach to be highly effective against such attacks.
Early detection of security bug reports (SBRs) is critical for timely vulnerability mitigation. We present an evaluation of prompt-based engineering and fine-tuning approaches for predicting SBRs using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our findings reveal a distinct trade-off between the two approaches. Prompted proprietary models demonstrate the highest sensitivity to SBRs, achieving a G-measure of 77% and a recall of 74% on average across all the datasets, albeit at the cost of a higher false-positive rate, resulting in an average precision of only 22%. Fine-tuned models, by contrast, exhibit the opposite behavior, attaining a lower overall G-measure of 51% but substantially higher precision of 75% at the cost of reduced recall of 36%. Though a one-time investment in building fine-tuned models is necessary, the inference on the largest dataset is up to 50 times faster than that of proprietary models. These findings suggest that further investigations to harness the power of LLMs for SBR prediction are necessary.