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Earlier sources: Security
Digital security protects systems, software, accounts, and information from misuse. Explore cybersecurity, vulnerabilities, threat intelligence, cryptography, privacy, and identity, with links to the underlying advisories and research.
SYMTRI organizes observations from public sources into a living map. Connections reflect shared subject matter; they do not establish causation or endorse a source.
Open in the map ↗665 classified signals in the fourteen-day window. Recent momentum: steady. These counts include signals awaiting readable evidence.
Earlier sources
Up to ten sources with readable evidence, ordered by their feed timestamp. These archive sources can be older than the live fourteen-day window. This list is a sample, not a measure of total activity. Dates distinguish paper publication, repository creation, model/dataset activity, Hacker News posts, and KEV catalog additions. “First archived” records when SYMTRI first stored the signal.
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Controlled Decoding Attacks on Black-Box LLMs ↗
Manipulating next-token probabilities during generation can bypass the safety alignment of large language models. Existing approaches, however, rely on access to model weights or numerical token probabilities and therefore do not apply to interfaces that return only sampled text. Reconstructing probabilities from sampled outputs offers a possible alternative, but finite sampling produces sparse and noisy estimates, while repeating this process at every generation step incurs substantial query costs. Our empirical observations suggest that large distributional changes along successful jailbreak…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Practical Secrets Extraction against Black-box LLMs ↗
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power autonomous coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code, yet their training corpora may contain confidential credentials exposed in public repositories or collected from private development artifacts, creating risks of memorization and subsequent leakage. Existing extraction audits, however, largely assume access to model weights or token probabilities. In this work, we present a black-box secret extraction framework for commercial, API-based LLMs under output-only access. It comprises (i) \emph{Cross-Validated Secret Knowledge Distillation}, whic…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
STAR-GRPO: Canonical Anchoring and Reliability-First Advantages against Representation-Dependent Reward Hacking ↗
Reward hacking occurs when policy optimization exploits a brittle reward interface or an overly permissive proxy objective, improving the training score without improving the underlying response quality. This phenomenon is amplified in group-relative policy optimization: an unsupported reward can shift the group baseline and alter the updates of other rollouts, while post-hoc or purely relative weighting cannot represent group-wide uncertainty. We propose \emph{Self-Tuned Anchored Reliability Group-Relative Policy Optimization} (STAR-GRPO), a reliability-first advantage estimator based on pair…
- Hacker News · Posted on Hacker News · First archived
NSA, military cyber forces will guard US election systems during midterms ↗
Hacker News discussion.
- arXiv · Published · First archived
SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs ↗
As LLM-based agents perform increasingly complex tasks, Agent Skills have emerged as a flexible mechanism for extending their capabilities. An Agent Skill packages task-specific instructions with executable components and auxiliary resources to provide specialized functionalities. However, the growing adoption of third-party Skills introduces a new supply-chain attack surface. Malicious Skills can embed harmful behaviors that abuse agent privileges and compromise the agent execution environment or accessible resources. Although recent LLM-based malicious Skill auditing approaches have achieved…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Safer Content or Firmer Refusals? A Hybrid Perturbation Defense for Alignment under Harmful Fine-tuning ↗
Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an otherwise benign fine-tuning set can degrade the model's alignment. Two recent alignment-stage defenses address this problem at different levels of the model. Vaccine improves the robustness of hidden embeddings to the representation shifts induced by harmful fine-tuning, whereas Booster simulates harmful weight updates and attenuates their effect during alignment. We investigate whether these mechani…
- GitHub · Repository created · First archived
nestjs/authentication ↗
An authentication module for NestJS (Node.js) 🔐
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Does the Unsafe Gradient Survive a Conversation? On the Fragility of Gradient-Based Jailbreak Detection in Multi-Turn Dialogue ↗
Safety-aligned language models are commonly deployed as multi-turn assistants, which lets adversaries spread unsafe intent across several user turns instead of a single prompt. Gradient-based jailbreak detectors such as GradSafe were developed for single prompts: they score an input by the alignment between its induced gradient and a fixed unsafe reference direction, and their effectiveness in multi-turn dialogue remains unclear. We conduct a controlled evaluation of gradient-based jailbreak detection in multi-turn settings. We extend GradSafe with a Context Window Scanner that applies the det…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
pikit: A Composable Toolkit for Indirect Prompt Injection Research and Evaluation ↗
Indirect prompt injection embeds malicious instructions within external content retrieved by LLM-based agents, altering target behavior without user authorization. We introduce pikit, a research toolkit designed to systematically evaluate these threats across three core dimensions: attacks (13 methods), channels (16 carriers across text and file modes), and defenses (9 prevention strategies and 3 offline detection baselines). Built on a decorator-based registry, pikit enables seamless extension of custom components without modifying core code, while a unified craft() API composes arbitrary att…
- Hacker News · Posted on Hacker News · First archived
Suicides in 5 Weeks. What's Going on at Cyber Command at Fort Meade? ↗
Hacker News discussion.
Live window recorded . This is the ingestion observation time, not the publication or discovery date of each source.
How to assess evidence about Security
Check each original source for its methods, release status, limitations, and supporting data. A repository announcement, a preprint, and a published study provide different kinds of evidence. SYMTRI’s subject classification helps discovery; it does not independently validate the source’s claims.
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