Daily Papers

Using the keyboard LEDs to send data optically was proposed in 2002 by Loughry and Umphress [1] (Appendix A). In this paper we extensively explore this threat in the context of a modern cyber-attack with current hardware and optical equipment. In this type of attack, an advanced persistent threat (APT) uses the keyboard LEDs (Caps-Lock, Num-Lock and Scroll-Lock) to encode information and exfiltrate data from airgapped computers optically. Notably, this exfiltration channel is not monitored by existing data leakage prevention (DLP) systems. We examine this attack and its boundaries for today's keyboards with USB controllers and sensitive optical sensors. We also introduce smartphone and smartwatch cameras as components of malicious insider and 'evil maid' attacks. We provide the necessary scientific background on optical communication and the characteristics of modern USB keyboards at the hardware and software level, and present a transmission protocol and modulation schemes. We implement the exfiltration malware, discuss its design and implementation issues, and evaluate it with different types of keyboards. We also test various receivers, including light sensors, remote cameras, 'extreme' cameras, security cameras, and smartphone cameras. Our experiment shows that data can be leaked from air-gapped computers via the keyboard LEDs at a maximum bit rate of 3000 bit/sec per LED given a light sensor as a receiver, and more than 120 bit/sec if smartphones are used. The attack doesn't require any modification of the keyboard at hardware or firmware levels.

As large language models (LLMs) become integrated into sensitive workflows, concerns grow over their potential to leak confidential information. We propose TrojanStego, a novel threat model in which an adversary fine-tunes an LLM to embed sensitive context information into natural-looking outputs via linguistic steganography, without requiring explicit control over inference inputs. We introduce a taxonomy outlining risk factors for compromised LLMs, and use it to evaluate the risk profile of the threat. To implement TrojanStego, we propose a practical encoding scheme based on vocabulary partitioning learnable by LLMs via fine-tuning. Experimental results show that compromised models reliably transmit 32-bit secrets with 87% accuracy on held-out prompts, reaching over 97% accuracy using majority voting across three generations. Further, they maintain high utility, can evade human detection, and preserve coherence. These results highlight a new class of LLM data exfiltration attacks that are passive, covert, practical, and dangerous.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic systems that interact with an external environment. However, LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks when handling untrusted data. In this paper we propose CaMeL, a robust defense that creates a protective system layer around the LLM, securing it even when underlying models may be susceptible to attacks. To operate, CaMeL explicitly extracts the control and data flows from the (trusted) query; therefore, the untrusted data retrieved by the LLM can never impact the program flow. To further improve security, CaMeL relies on a notion of a capability to prevent the exfiltration of private data over unauthorized data flows. We demonstrate effectiveness of CaMeL by solving 67% of tasks with provable security in AgentDojo [NeurIPS 2024], a recent agentic security benchmark.

This paper identifies and analyzes a novel vulnerability class in Model Context Protocol (MCP) based agent systems. The attack chain describes and demonstrates how benign, individually authorized tasks can be orchestrated to produce harmful emergent behaviors. Through systematic analysis using the MITRE ATLAS framework, we demonstrate how 95 agents tested with access to multiple services-including browser automation, financial analysis, location tracking, and code deployment-can chain legitimate operations into sophisticated attack sequences that extend beyond the security boundaries of any individual service. These red team exercises survey whether current MCP architectures lack cross-domain security measures necessary to detect or prevent a large category of compositional attacks. We present empirical evidence of specific attack chains that achieve targeted harm through service orchestration, including data exfiltration, financial manipulation, and infrastructure compromise. These findings reveal that the fundamental security assumption of service isolation fails when agents can coordinate actions across multiple domains, creating an exponential attack surface that grows with each additional capability. This research provides a barebones experimental framework that evaluate not whether agents can complete MCP benchmark tasks, but what happens when they complete them too well and optimize across multiple services in ways that violate human expectations and safety constraints. We propose three concrete experimental directions using the existing MCP benchmark suite.

Computer use agents are LLM-based agents that can directly interact with a graphical user interface, by processing screenshots or accessibility trees. While these systems are gaining popularity, their safety has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that evaluating and understanding their potential for harmful behavior is essential for widespread adoption. To address this gap, we introduce OS-Harm, a new benchmark for measuring safety of computer use agents. OS-Harm is built on top of the OSWorld environment and aims to test models across three categories of harm: deliberate user misuse, prompt injection attacks, and model misbehavior. To cover these cases, we create 150 tasks that span several types of safety violations (harassment, copyright infringement, disinformation, data exfiltration, etc.) and require the agent to interact with a variety of OS applications (email client, code editor, browser, etc.). Moreover, we propose an automated judge to evaluate both accuracy and safety of agents that achieves high agreement with human annotations (0.76 and 0.79 F1 score). We evaluate computer use agents based on a range of frontier models - such as o4-mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro - and provide insights into their safety. In particular, all models tend to directly comply with many deliberate misuse queries, are relatively vulnerable to static prompt injections, and occasionally perform unsafe actions. The OS-Harm benchmark is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/os-harm.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) demonstrate increasing integration into next-generation applications, but their safety in backdoor attacks remains largely underexplored. However, existing research has focused exclusively on single-agent backdoor attacks, overlooking the novel attack surfaces introduced by agent collaboration in MAS. To bridge this gap, we present the first Distributed Backdoor Attack tailored to MAS. We decompose the backdoor into multiple distributed attack primitives that are embedded within MAS tools. These primitives remain dormant individually but collectively activate only when agents collaborate in a specific sequence, thereby assembling the full backdoor to execute targeted attacks such as data exfiltration. To fully assess this threat, we introduce a benchmark for multi-role collaborative tasks and a sandboxed framework to evaluate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack achieves an attack success rate exceeding 95% without degrading performance on benign tasks. This work exposes novel backdoor attack surfaces that exploit agent collaboration, underscoring the need to move beyond single-agent protection. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/Distributed-Backdoor-Attacks-in-MAS.

Indiscriminate data poisoning attacks aim to decrease a model's test accuracy by injecting a small amount of corrupted training data. Despite significant interest, existing attacks remain relatively ineffective against modern machine learning (ML) architectures. In this work, we introduce the notion of model poisoning reachability as a technical tool to explore the intrinsic limits of data poisoning attacks towards target parameters (i.e., model-targeted attacks). We derive an easily computable threshold to establish and quantify a surprising phase transition phenomenon among popular ML models: data poisoning attacks can achieve certain target parameters only when the poisoning ratio exceeds our threshold. Building on existing parameter corruption attacks and refining the Gradient Canceling attack, we perform extensive experiments to confirm our theoretical findings, test the predictability of our transition threshold, and significantly improve existing indiscriminate data poisoning baselines over a range of datasets and models. Our work highlights the critical role played by the poisoning ratio, and sheds new insights on existing empirical results, attacks and mitigation strategies in data poisoning.

An attacker can gain information of a user by analyzing its network traffic. The size of transferred data leaks information about the file being transferred or the service being used, and this is particularly revealing when the attacker has background knowledge about the files or services available for transfer. To prevent this, servers may pad their files using a padding scheme, changing the file sizes and preventing anyone from guessing their identity uniquely. This work focuses on finding optimal padding schemes that keep a balance between privacy and the costs of bandwidth increase. We consider R\'enyi-min leakage as our main measure for privacy, since it is directly related with the success of a simple attacker, and compare our algorithms with an existing solution that minimizes Shannon leakage. We provide improvements to our algorithms in order to optimize average total padding and Shannon leakage while minimizing R\'enyi-min leakage. Moreover, our algorithms are designed to handle a more general and important scenario in which multiple servers wish to compute padding schemes in a way that protects the servers' identity in addition to the identity of the files.

Data contamination hinders fair LLM evaluation by introducing test data into newer models' training sets. Existing studies solve this challenge by updating benchmarks with newly collected data. However, they fail to guarantee contamination-free evaluation as the newly collected data may contain pre-existing knowledge, and their benchmark updates rely on intensive human labor. To address these issues, we in this paper propose AntiLeak-Bench, an automated anti-leakage benchmarking framework. Instead of simply using newly collected data, we construct samples with explicitly new knowledge absent from LLMs' training sets, which thus ensures strictly contamination-free evaluation. We further design a fully automated workflow to build and update our benchmark without human labor. This significantly reduces the cost of benchmark maintenance to accommodate emerging LLMs. Through extensive experiments, we highlight that data contamination likely exists before LLMs' cutoff time and demonstrate AntiLeak-Bench effectively overcomes this challenge.

When large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate tasks and interact with untrusted external data, prompt injection emerges as a significant security threat. By injecting malicious instructions into the data that LLMs access, an attacker can arbitrarily override the original user task and redirect the agent toward unintended, potentially harmful actions. Existing defenses either require access to model weights (fine-tuning), incur substantial utility loss (detection-based), or demand non-trivial system redesign (system-level). Motivated by this, we propose DataFilter, a test-time model-agnostic defense that removes malicious instructions from the data before it reaches the backend LLM. DataFilter is trained with supervised fine-tuning on simulated injections and leverages both the user's instruction and the data to selectively strip adversarial content while preserving benign information. Across multiple benchmarks, DataFilter consistently reduces the prompt injection attack success rates to near zero while maintaining the LLMs' utility. DataFilter delivers strong security, high utility, and plug-and-play deployment, making it a strong practical defense to secure black-box commercial LLMs against prompt injection. Our DataFilter model is released at https://huggingface.co/JoyYizhu/DataFilter for immediate use, with the code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/yizhu-joy/DataFilter.

The widespread deployment of LLM-based agents is likely to introduce a critical privacy threat: malicious agents that proactively engage others in multi-turn interactions to extract sensitive information. These dynamic dialogues enable adaptive attack strategies that can cause severe privacy violations, yet their evolving nature makes it difficult to anticipate and discover sophisticated vulnerabilities manually. To tackle this problem, we present a search-based framework that alternates between improving attacker and defender instructions by simulating privacy-critical agent interactions. Each simulation involves three roles: data subject, data sender, and data recipient. While the data subject's behavior is fixed, the attacker (data recipient) attempts to extract sensitive information from the defender (data sender) through persistent and interactive exchanges. To explore this interaction space efficiently, our search algorithm employs LLMs as optimizers, using parallel search with multiple threads and cross-thread propagation to analyze simulation trajectories and iteratively propose new instructions. Through this process, we find that attack strategies escalate from simple direct requests to sophisticated multi-turn tactics such as impersonation and consent forgery, while defenses advance from rule-based constraints to identity-verification state machines. The discovered attacks and defenses transfer across diverse scenarios and backbone models, demonstrating strong practical utility for building privacy-aware agents.

Data poisoning attacks pose a significant threat to the integrity of machine learning models by leading to misclassification of target distribution data by injecting adversarial examples during training. Existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) defense methods suffer from limitations, such as significantly reduced generalization performance and significant overhead during training, making them impractical or limited for real-world applications. In response to this challenge, we introduce a universal data purification method that defends naturally trained classifiers from malicious white-, gray-, and black-box image poisons by applying a universal stochastic preprocessing step Psi_{T}(x), realized by iterative Langevin sampling of a convergent Energy Based Model (EBM) initialized with an image x. Mid-run dynamics of Psi_{T}(x) purify poison information with minimal impact on features important to the generalization of a classifier network. We show that EBMs remain universal purifiers, even in the presence of poisoned EBM training data, and achieve SoTA defense on leading triggered and triggerless poisons. This work is a subset of a larger framework introduced in \pgen with a more detailed focus on EBM purification and poison defense.

Digital image steganalysis, or the detection of image steganography, has been studied in depth for years and is driven by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups', such as APT37 Reaper, utilization of steganographic techniques to transmit additional malware to perform further post-exploitation activity on a compromised host. However, many steganalysis algorithms are constrained to work with only a subset of all possible images in the wild or are known to produce a high false positive rate. This results in blocking any suspected image being an unreasonable policy. A more feasible policy is to filter suspicious images prior to reception by the host machine. However, how does one optimally filter specifically to obfuscate or remove image steganography while avoiding degradation of visual image quality in the case that detection of the image was a false positive? We propose the Deep Digital Steganography Purifier (DDSP), a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which is optimized to destroy steganographic content without compromising the perceptual quality of the original image. As verified by experimental results, our model is capable of providing a high rate of destruction of steganographic image content while maintaining a high visual quality in comparison to other state-of-the-art filtering methods. Additionally, we test the transfer learning capability of generalizing to to obfuscate real malware payloads embedded into different image file formats and types using an unseen steganographic algorithm and prove that our model can in fact be deployed to provide adequate results.

Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) are malicious techniques used by malware to dynamically generate seemingly random domain names for communication with Command & Control (C&C) servers. Due to the fast and simple generation of DGA domains, detection methods must be highly efficient and precise to be effective. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their proficiency in real-time detection tasks, making them ideal candidates for detecting DGAs. Our work validates the effectiveness of fine-tuned LLMs for detecting DGAs and DNS exfiltration attacks. We developed LLM models and conducted comprehensive evaluation using a diverse dataset comprising 59 distinct real-world DGA malware families and normal domain data. Our LLM model significantly outperformed traditional natural language processing techniques, especially in detecting unknown DGAs. We also evaluated its performance on DNS exfiltration datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing cybersecurity measures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that empirically applies LLMs for DGA and DNS exfiltration detection.

The rapid advancement and widespread use of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant concerns regarding the potential leakage of personally identifiable information (PII). These models are often trained on vast quantities of web-collected data, which may inadvertently include sensitive personal data. This paper presents ProPILE, a novel probing tool designed to empower data subjects, or the owners of the PII, with awareness of potential PII leakage in LLM-based services. ProPILE lets data subjects formulate prompts based on their own PII to evaluate the level of privacy intrusion in LLMs. We demonstrate its application on the OPT-1.3B model trained on the publicly available Pile dataset. We show how hypothetical data subjects may assess the likelihood of their PII being included in the Pile dataset being revealed. ProPILE can also be leveraged by LLM service providers to effectively evaluate their own levels of PII leakage with more powerful prompts specifically tuned for their in-house models. This tool represents a pioneering step towards empowering the data subjects for their awareness and control over their own data on the web.

Recent work has embodied LLMs as agents, allowing them to access tools, perform actions, and interact with external content (e.g., emails or websites). However, external content introduces the risk of indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded within the content processed by LLMs, aiming to manipulate these agents into executing detrimental actions against users. Given the potentially severe consequences of such attacks, establishing benchmarks to assess and mitigate these risks is imperative. In this work, we introduce InjecAgent, a benchmark designed to assess the vulnerability of tool-integrated LLM agents to IPI attacks. InjecAgent comprises 1,054 test cases covering 17 different user tools and 62 attacker tools. We categorize attack intentions into two primary types: direct harm to users and exfiltration of private data. We evaluate 30 different LLM agents and show that agents are vulnerable to IPI attacks, with ReAct-prompted GPT-4 vulnerable to attacks 24% of the time. Further investigation into an enhanced setting, where the attacker instructions are reinforced with a hacking prompt, shows additional increases in success rates, nearly doubling the attack success rate on the ReAct-prompted GPT-4. Our findings raise questions about the widespread deployment of LLM Agents. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/InjecAgent.

Aiming to train and deploy predictive models, organizations collect large amounts of detailed client data, risking the exposure of private information in the event of a breach. To mitigate this, policymakers increasingly demand compliance with the data minimization (DM) principle, restricting data collection to only that data which is relevant and necessary for the task. Despite regulatory pressure, the problem of deploying machine learning models that obey DM has so far received little attention. In this work, we address this challenge in a comprehensive manner. We propose a novel vertical DM (vDM) workflow based on data generalization, which by design ensures that no full-resolution client data is collected during training and deployment of models, benefiting client privacy by reducing the attack surface in case of a breach. We formalize and study the corresponding problem of finding generalizations that both maximize data utility and minimize empirical privacy risk, which we quantify by introducing a diverse set of policy-aligned adversarial scenarios. Finally, we propose a range of baseline vDM algorithms, as well as Privacy-aware Tree (PAT), an especially effective vDM algorithm that outperforms all baselines across several settings. We plan to release our code as a publicly available library, helping advance the standardization of DM for machine learning. Overall, we believe our work can help lay the foundation for further exploration and adoption of DM principles in real-world applications.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attack, which does not affect the network's performance on clean data but would manipulate the network behavior once a trigger pattern is added. Existing defense methods have greatly reduced attack success rate, but their prediction accuracy on clean data still lags behind a clean model by a large margin. Inspired by the stealthiness and effectiveness of backdoor attack, we propose a simple but highly effective defense framework which injects non-adversarial backdoors targeting poisoned samples. Following the general steps in backdoor attack, we detect a small set of suspected samples and then apply a poisoning strategy to them. The non-adversarial backdoor, once triggered, suppresses the attacker's backdoor on poisoned data, but has limited influence on clean data. The defense can be carried out during data preprocessing, without any modification to the standard end-to-end training pipeline. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks with different architectures and representative attacks. Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense effectiveness with by far the lowest performance drop on clean data. Considering the surprising defense ability displayed by our framework, we call for more attention to utilizing backdoor for backdoor defense. Code is available at https://github.com/damianliumin/non-adversarial_backdoor.

Modern machine learning (ML) systems demand substantial training data, often resorting to external sources. Nevertheless, this practice renders them vulnerable to backdoor poisoning attacks. Prior backdoor defense strategies have primarily focused on the identification of backdoored models or poisoned data characteristics, typically operating under the assumption of access to clean data. In this work, we delve into a relatively underexplored challenge: the automatic identification of backdoor data within a poisoned dataset, all under realistic conditions, i.e., without the need for additional clean data or without manually defining a threshold for backdoor detection. We draw an inspiration from the scaled prediction consistency (SPC) technique, which exploits the prediction invariance of poisoned data to an input scaling factor. Based on this, we pose the backdoor data identification problem as a hierarchical data splitting optimization problem, leveraging a novel SPC-based loss function as the primary optimization objective. Our innovation unfolds in several key aspects. First, we revisit the vanilla SPC method, unveiling its limitations in addressing the proposed backdoor identification problem. Subsequently, we develop a bi-level optimization-based approach to precisely identify backdoor data by minimizing the advanced SPC loss. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal against a spectrum of backdoor attacks, encompassing basic label-corrupted attacks as well as more sophisticated clean-label attacks, evaluated across various benchmark datasets. Experiment results show that our approach often surpasses the performance of current baselines in identifying backdoor data points, resulting in about 4%-36% improvement in average AUROC. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/BackdoorMSPC.

Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing. Most of the blocking solutions rely on crowd-sourced filter lists manually maintained by a large community of users. In this work, we seek to simplify the update of these filter lists by combining different websites through a large-scale graph connecting all resource requests made over a large set of sites. The features of this graph are extracted and used to train a machine learning algorithm with the aim of detecting ads and tracking resources. As our approach combines different information sources, it is more robust toward evasion techniques that use obfuscation or changing the usage patterns. We evaluate our work over the Alexa top-10K websites and find its accuracy to be 96.1% biased and 90.9% unbiased with high precision and recall. It can also block new ads and tracking services, which would necessitate being blocked by further crowd-sourced existing filter lists. Moreover, the approach followed in this paper sheds light on the ecosystem of third-party tracking and advertising.

We present ExCyTIn-Bench, the first benchmark to Evaluate an LLM agent x on the task of Cyber Threat Investigation through security questions derived from investigation graphs. Real-world security analysts must sift through a large number of heterogeneous alert signals and security logs, follow multi-hop chains of evidence, and compile an incident report. With the developments of LLMs, building LLM-based agents for automatic thread investigation is a promising direction. To assist the development and evaluation of LLM agents, we construct a dataset from a controlled Azure tenant that covers 8 simulated real-world multi-step attacks, 57 log tables from Microsoft Sentinel and related services, and 589 automatically generated questions. We leverage security logs extracted with expert-crafted detection logic to build threat investigation graphs, and then generate questions with LLMs using paired nodes on the graph, taking the start node as background context and the end node as answer. Anchoring each question to these explicit nodes and edges not only provides automatic, explainable ground truth answers but also makes the pipeline reusable and readily extensible to new logs. This also enables the automatic generation of procedural tasks with verifiable rewards, which can be naturally extended to training agents via reinforcement learning. Our comprehensive experiments with different models confirm the difficulty of the task: with the base setting, the average reward across all evaluated models is 0.249, and the best achieved is 0.368, leaving substantial headroom for future research. Code and data are coming soon!

Data trading is essential to accelerate the development of data-driven machine learning pipelines. The central problem in data trading is to estimate the utility of a seller's dataset with respect to a given buyer's machine learning task, also known as data valuation. Typically, data valuation requires one or more participants to share their raw dataset with others, leading to potential risks of intellectual property (IP) violations. In this paper, we tackle the novel task of preemptively protecting the IP of datasets that need to be shared during data valuation. First, we identify and formalize two kinds of novel IP risks in visual datasets: data-item (image) IP and statistical (dataset) IP. Then, we propose a novel algorithm to convert the raw dataset into a sanitized version, that provides resistance to IP violations, while at the same time allowing accurate data valuation. The key idea is to limit the transfer of information from the raw dataset to the sanitized dataset, thereby protecting against potential intellectual property violations. Next, we analyze our method for the likely existence of a solution and immunity against reconstruction attacks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three computer vision datasets demonstrating the advantages of our method in comparison to other baselines.

Data de-identification makes it possible to glean insights from data while preserving user privacy. The use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow for the execution of de-identification applications on the cloud without the need for a user to trust the third-party application provider. In this paper, we present SPIDEr - Secure Pipeline for Information De-Identification with End-to-End Encryption, our implementation of an end-to-end encrypted data de-identification pipeline. SPIDEr supports classical anonymisation techniques such as suppression, pseudonymisation, generalisation, and aggregation, as well as techniques that offer a formal privacy guarantee such as k-anonymisation and differential privacy. To enable scalability and improve performance on constrained TEE hardware, we enable batch processing of data for differential privacy computations. We present our design of the control flows for end-to-end secure execution of de-identification operations within a TEE. As part of the control flow for running SPIDEr within the TEE, we perform attestation, a process that verifies that the software binaries were properly instantiated on a known, trusted platform.

Fine-tuning on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with proprietary data is now a standard practice for downstream developers to obtain task-specific LLMs. Surprisingly, we reveal a new and concerning risk along with the practice: the creator of the open-source LLMs can later extract the private downstream fine-tuning data through simple backdoor training, only requiring black-box access to the fine-tuned downstream model. Our comprehensive experiments, across 4 popularly used open-source models with 3B to 32B parameters and 2 downstream datasets, suggest that the extraction performance can be strikingly high: in practical settings, as much as 76.3% downstream fine-tuning data (queries) out of a total 5,000 samples can be perfectly extracted, and the success rate can increase to 94.9% in more ideal settings. We also explore a detection-based defense strategy but find it can be bypassed with improved attack. Overall, we highlight the emergency of this newly identified data breaching risk in fine-tuning, and we hope that more follow-up research could push the progress of addressing this concerning risk. The code and data used in our experiments are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/Backdoor-Data-Extraction.

Previous work has shown that Large Language Models are susceptible to so-called data extraction attacks. This allows an attacker to extract a sample that was contained in the training data, which has massive privacy implications. The construction of data extraction attacks is challenging, current attacks are quite inefficient, and there exists a significant gap in the extraction capabilities of untargeted attacks and memorization. Thus, targeted attacks are proposed, which identify if a given sample from the training data, is extractable from a model. In this work, we apply a targeted data extraction attack to the SATML2023 Language Model Training Data Extraction Challenge. We apply a two-step approach. In the first step, we maximise the recall of the model and are able to extract the suffix for 69% of the samples. In the second step, we use a classifier-based Membership Inference Attack on the generations. Our AutoSklearn classifier achieves a precision of 0.841. The full approach reaches a score of 0.405 recall at a 10% false positive rate, which is an improvement of 34% over the baseline of 0.301.

Moderators and automated methods enforce bans on malicious users who engage in disruptive behavior. However, malicious users can easily create a new account to evade such bans. Previous research has focused on other forms of online deception, like the simultaneous operation of multiple accounts by the same entities (sockpuppetry), impersonation of other individuals, and studying the effects of de-platforming individuals and communities. Here we conduct the first data-driven study of ban evasion, i.e., the act of circumventing bans on an online platform, leading to temporally disjoint operation of accounts by the same user. We curate a novel dataset of 8,551 ban evasion pairs (parent, child) identified on Wikipedia and contrast their behavior with benign users and non-evading malicious users. We find that evasion child accounts demonstrate similarities with respect to their banned parent accounts on several behavioral axes - from similarity in usernames and edited pages to similarity in content added to the platform and its psycholinguistic attributes. We reveal key behavioral attributes of accounts that are likely to evade bans. Based on the insights from the analyses, we train logistic regression classifiers to detect and predict ban evasion at three different points in the ban evasion lifecycle. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in predicting future evaders (AUC = 0.78), early detection of ban evasion (AUC = 0.85), and matching child accounts with parent accounts (MRR = 0.97). Our work can aid moderators by reducing their workload and identifying evasion pairs faster and more efficiently than current manual and heuristic-based approaches. Dataset is available https://github.com/srijankr/ban_evasion{here}.

Machine Learning models increasingly face data integrity challenges due to the use of large-scale training datasets drawn from the Internet. We study what model developers can do if they detect that some data was manipulated or incorrect. Such manipulated data can cause adverse effects including vulnerability to backdoored samples, systemic biases, and reduced accuracy on certain input domains. Realistically, all manipulated training samples cannot be identified, and only a small, representative subset of the affected data can be flagged. We formalize Corrective Machine Unlearning as the problem of mitigating the impact of data affected by unknown manipulations on a trained model, only having identified a subset of the corrupted data. We demonstrate that the problem of corrective unlearning has significantly different requirements from traditional privacy-oriented unlearning. We find most existing unlearning methods, including retraining-from-scratch without the deletion set, require most of the manipulated data to be identified for effective corrective unlearning. However, one approach, Selective Synaptic Dampening, achieves limited success, unlearning adverse effects with just a small portion of the manipulated samples in our setting, which shows encouraging signs for future progress. We hope our work spurs research towards developing better methods for corrective unlearning and offers practitioners a new strategy to handle data integrity challenges arising from web-scale training. Code is available at https://github.com/drimpossible/corrective-unlearning-bench.

Anonymized data is highly valuable to both businesses and researchers. A large body of research has however shown the strong limits of the de-identification release-and-forget model, where data is anonymized and shared. This has led to the development of privacy-preserving query-based systems. Based on the idea of "sticky noise", Diffix has been recently proposed as a novel query-based mechanism satisfying alone the EU Article~29 Working Party's definition of anonymization. According to its authors, Diffix adds less noise to answers than solutions based on differential privacy while allowing for an unlimited number of queries. This paper presents a new class of noise-exploitation attacks, exploiting the noise added by the system to infer private information about individuals in the dataset. Our first differential attack uses samples extracted from Diffix in a likelihood ratio test to discriminate between two probability distributions. We show that using this attack against a synthetic best-case dataset allows us to infer private information with 89.4% accuracy using only 5 attributes. Our second cloning attack uses dummy conditions that conditionally strongly affect the output of the query depending on the value of the private attribute. Using this attack on four real-world datasets, we show that we can infer private attributes of at least 93% of the users in the dataset with accuracy between 93.3% and 97.1%, issuing a median of 304 queries per user. We show how to optimize this attack, targeting 55.4% of the users and achieving 91.7% accuracy, using a maximum of only 32 queries per user. Our attacks demonstrate that adding data-dependent noise, as done by Diffix, is not sufficient to prevent inference of private attributes. We furthermore argue that Diffix alone fails to satisfy Art. 29 WP's definition of anonymization. [...]

Recent deep neural networks (DNNs) have come to rely on vast amounts of training data, providing an opportunity for malicious attackers to exploit and contaminate the data to carry out backdoor attacks. These attacks significantly undermine the reliability of DNNs. However, existing backdoor attack methods make unrealistic assumptions, assuming that all training data comes from a single source and that attackers have full access to the training data. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a more realistic attack scenario where victims collect data from multiple sources, and attackers cannot access the complete training data. We refer to this scenario as data-constrained backdoor attacks. In such cases, previous attack methods suffer from severe efficiency degradation due to the entanglement between benign and poisoning features during the backdoor injection process. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages the pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model. We introduce three CLIP-based technologies from two distinct streams: Clean Feature Suppression, which aims to suppress the influence of clean features to enhance the prominence of poisoning features, and Poisoning Feature Augmentation, which focuses on augmenting the presence and impact of poisoning features to effectively manipulate the model's behavior. To evaluate the effectiveness, harmlessness to benign accuracy, and stealthiness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on 3 target models, 3 datasets, and over 15 different settings. The results demonstrate remarkable improvements, with some settings achieving over 100% improvement compared to existing attacks in data-constrained scenarios. Our research contributes to addressing the limitations of existing methods and provides a practical and effective solution for data-constrained backdoor attacks.

New capabilities in foundation models are owed in large part to massive, widely-sourced, and under-documented training data collections. Existing practices in data collection have led to challenges in documenting data transparency, tracing authenticity, verifying consent, privacy, representation, bias, copyright infringement, and the overall development of ethical and trustworthy foundation models. In response, regulation is emphasizing the need for training data transparency to understand foundation models' limitations. Based on a large-scale analysis of the foundation model training data landscape and existing solutions, we identify the missing infrastructure to facilitate responsible foundation model development practices. We examine the current shortcomings of common tools for tracing data authenticity, consent, and documentation, and outline how policymakers, developers, and data creators can facilitate responsible foundation model development by adopting universal data provenance standards.

For nearly a decade the academic community has investigated backdoors in neural networks, primarily focusing on classification tasks where adversaries manipulate the model prediction. While demonstrably malicious, the immediate real-world impact of such prediction-altering attacks has remained unclear. In this paper we introduce a novel and significantly more potent class of backdoors that builds upon recent advancements in architectural backdoors. We demonstrate how these backdoors can be specifically engineered to exploit batched inference, a common technique for hardware utilization, enabling large-scale user data manipulation and theft. By targeting the batching process, these architectural backdoors facilitate information leakage between concurrent user requests and allow attackers to fully control model responses directed at other users within the same batch. In other words, an attacker who can change the model architecture can set and steal model inputs and outputs of other users within the same batch. We show that such attacks are not only feasible but also alarmingly effective, can be readily injected into prevalent model architectures, and represent a truly malicious threat to user privacy and system integrity. Critically, to counteract this new class of vulnerabilities, we propose a deterministic mitigation strategy that provides formal guarantees against this new attack vector, unlike prior work that relied on Large Language Models to find the backdoors. Our mitigation strategy employs a novel Information Flow Control mechanism that analyzes the model graph and proves non-interference between different user inputs within the same batch. Using our mitigation strategy we perform a large scale analysis of models hosted through Hugging Face and find over 200 models that introduce (unintended) information leakage between batch entries due to the use of dynamic quantization.

Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data. This work demonstrates for the first time that poisoning attacks instead require a near-constant number of documents regardless of dataset size. We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data. We also run smaller-scale experiments to ablate factors that could influence attack success, including broader ratios of poisoned to clean data and non-random distributions of poisoned samples. Finally, we demonstrate the same dynamics for poisoning during fine-tuning. Altogether, our results suggest that injecting backdoors through data poisoning may be easier for large models than previously believed as the number of poisons required does not scale up with model size, highlighting the need for more research on defences to mitigate this risk in future models.

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on the huge amount of pre-training data learned in the pre-training phase. The opacity of the pre-training process and the training data causes the results of many benchmark tests to become unreliable. If any model has been trained on a benchmark test set, it can seriously hinder the health of the field. In order to automate and efficiently test the capabilities of large language models, numerous mainstream benchmarks adopt a multiple-choice format. As the swapping of the contents of multiple-choice options does not affect the meaning of the question itself, we propose a simple and effective data leakage detection method based on this property. Specifically, we shuffle the contents of the options in the data to generate the corresponding derived data sets, and then detect data leakage based on the model's log probability distribution over the derived data sets. If there is a maximum and outlier in the set of log probabilities, it indicates that the data is leaked. Our method is able to work under black-box conditions without access to model training data or weights, effectively identifying data leakage from benchmark test sets in model pre-training data, including both normal scenarios and complex scenarios where options may have been shuffled intentionally or unintentionally. Through experiments based on two LLMs and benchmark designs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, we evaluate the degree of data leakage of 31 mainstream open-source LLMs on four benchmark datasets and give a ranking of the leaked LLMs for each benchmark, and we find that the Qwen family of LLMs has the highest degree of data leakage.

Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- models lose their safety alignment ability after fine-tuning on a few harmful samples. For risk mitigation, a guardrail is typically used to filter out harmful samples before fine-tuning. By designing a new red-teaming method, we in this paper show that purely relying on the moderation guardrail for data filtration is not reliable. Our proposed attack method, dubbed Virus, easily bypasses the guardrail moderation by slightly modifying the harmful data. Experimental results show that the harmful data optimized by Virus is not detectable by the guardrail with up to 100\% leakage ratio, and can simultaneously achieve superior attack performance. Finally, the key message we want to convey through this paper is that: it is reckless to consider guardrail moderation as a clutch at straws towards harmful fine-tuning attack, as it cannot solve the inherent safety issue of the pre-trained LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Virus

Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) was shown to be vulnerable to patch-based data poisoning backdoor attacks. It was shown that an adversary can poison a small part of the unlabeled data so that when a victim trains an SSL model on it, the final model will have a backdoor that the adversary can exploit. This work aims to defend self-supervised learning against such attacks. We use a three-step defense pipeline, where we first train a model on the poisoned data. In the second step, our proposed defense algorithm (PatchSearch) uses the trained model to search the training data for poisoned samples and removes them from the training set. In the third step, a final model is trained on the cleaned-up training set. Our results show that PatchSearch is an effective defense. As an example, it improves a model's accuracy on images containing the trigger from 38.2% to 63.7% which is very close to the clean model's accuracy, 64.6%. Moreover, we show that PatchSearch outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art defense approaches including those using additional clean, trusted data. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCDvision/PatchSearch

Ensuring compliance with international data protection standards for privacy and data security is a crucial but complex task, often requiring substantial legal expertise. This paper introduces LegiLM, a novel legal language model specifically tailored for consulting on data or information compliance. LegiLM leverages a pre-trained GDPR Fines dataset and has been fine-tuned to automatically assess whether particular actions or events breach data security and privacy regulations. By incorporating a specialized dataset that includes global data protection laws, meticulously annotated policy documents, and relevant privacy policies, LegiLM is optimized for addressing data compliance challenges. The model integrates advanced legal reasoning methods and information retrieval enhancements to enhance accuracy and reliability in practical legal consulting scenarios. Our evaluation using a custom benchmark dataset demonstrates that LegiLM excels in detecting data regulation breaches, offering sound legal justifications, and recommending necessary compliance modifications, setting a new benchmark for AI-driven legal compliance solutions. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/DAOLegalAI/LegiLM

Backdoor attack aims to deceive a victim model when facing backdoor instances while maintaining its performance on benign data. Current methods use manual patterns or special perturbations as triggers, while they often overlook the robustness against data corruption, making backdoor attacks easy to defend in practice. To address this issue, we propose a novel backdoor attack method named Spy-Watermark, which remains effective when facing data collapse and backdoor defense. Therein, we introduce a learnable watermark embedded in the latent domain of images, serving as the trigger. Then, we search for a watermark that can withstand collapse during image decoding, cooperating with several anti-collapse operations to further enhance the resilience of our trigger against data corruption. Extensive experiments are conducted on CIFAR10, GTSRB, and ImageNet datasets, demonstrating that Spy-Watermark overtakes ten state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and stealthiness.

Credit cards play an exploding role in modern economies. Its popularity and ubiquity have created a fertile ground for fraud, assisted by the cross boarder reach and instantaneous confirmation. While transactions are growing, the fraud percentages are also on the rise as well as the true cost of a dollar fraud. Volume of transactions, uniqueness of frauds and ingenuity of the fraudster are main challenges in detecting frauds. The advent of machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data has opened up new tools in the fight against frauds. Given past transactions, a machine learning algorithm has the ability to 'learn' infinitely complex characteristics in order to identify frauds in real-time, surpassing the best human investigators. However, the developments in fraud detection algorithms has been challenging and slow due the massively unbalanced nature of fraud data, absence of benchmarks and standard evaluation metrics to identify better performing classifiers, lack of sharing and disclosure of research findings and the difficulties in getting access to confidential transaction data for research. This work investigates the properties of typical massively imbalanced fraud data sets, their availability, suitability for research use while exploring the widely varying nature of fraud distributions. Furthermore, we show how human annotation errors compound with machine classification errors. We also carry out experiments to determine the effect of PCA obfuscation (as a means of disseminating sensitive transaction data for research and machine learning) on algorithmic performance of classifiers and show that while PCA does not significantly degrade performance, care should be taken to use the appropriate principle component size (dimensions) to avoid overfitting.

The recent success and proliferation of machine learning and deep learning have provided powerful tools, which are also utilized for encrypted traffic analysis, classification, and threat detection in computer networks. These methods, neural networks in particular, are often complex and require a huge corpus of training data. Therefore, this paper focuses on collecting a large up-to-date dataset with almost 200 fine-grained service labels and 140 million network flows extended with packet-level metadata. The number of flows is three orders of magnitude higher than in other existing public labeled datasets of encrypted traffic. The number of service labels, which is important to make the problem hard and realistic, is four times higher than in the public dataset with the most class labels. The published dataset is intended as a benchmark for identifying services in encrypted traffic. Service identification can be further extended with the task of "rejecting" unknown services, i.e., the traffic not seen during the training phase. Neural networks offer superior performance for tackling this more challenging problem. To showcase the dataset's usefulness, we implemented a neural network with a multi-modal architecture, which is the state-of-the-art approach, and achieved 97.04% classification accuracy and detected 91.94% of unknown services with 5% false positive rate.

Modern neural networks are often trained on massive datasets that are web scraped with minimal human inspection. As a result of this insecure curation pipeline, an adversary can poison or backdoor the resulting model by uploading malicious data to the internet and waiting for a victim to scrape and train on it. Existing approaches for creating poisons and backdoors start with randomly sampled clean data, called base samples, and then modify those samples to craft poisons. However, some base samples may be significantly more amenable to poisoning than others. As a result, we may be able to craft more potent poisons by carefully choosing the base samples. In this work, we use guided diffusion to synthesize base samples from scratch that lead to significantly more potent poisons and backdoors than previous state-of-the-art attacks. Our Guided Diffusion Poisoning (GDP) base samples can be combined with any downstream poisoning or backdoor attack to boost its effectiveness. Our implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hsouri/GDP .

This research paper explores the privacy and security threats posed to an Agentic AI system with direct access to database systems. Such access introduces significant risks, including unauthorized retrieval of sensitive information, potential exploitation of system vulnerabilities, and misuse of personal or confidential data. The complexity of AI systems combined with their ability to process and analyze large volumes of data increases the chances of data leaks or breaches, which could occur unintentionally or through adversarial manipulation. Furthermore, as AI agents evolve with greater autonomy, their capacity to bypass or exploit security measures becomes a growing concern, heightening the need to address these critical vulnerabilities in agentic systems.

Early backdoor attacks against machine learning set off an arms race in attack and defence development. Defences have since appeared demonstrating some ability to detect backdoors in models or even remove them. These defences work by inspecting the training data, the model, or the integrity of the training procedure. In this work, we show that backdoors can be added during compilation, circumventing any safeguards in the data preparation and model training stages. As an illustration, the attacker can insert weight-based backdoors during the hardware compilation step that will not be detected by any training or data-preparation process. Next, we demonstrate that some backdoors, such as ImpNet, can only be reliably detected at the stage where they are inserted and removing them anywhere else presents a significant challenge. We conclude that machine-learning model security requires assurance of provenance along the entire technical pipeline, including the data, model architecture, compiler, and hardware specification.

Backdoor attacks pose a serious security threat for training neural networks as they surreptitiously introduce hidden functionalities into a model. Such backdoors remain silent during inference on clean inputs, evading detection due to inconspicuous behavior. However, once a specific trigger pattern appears in the input data, the backdoor activates, causing the model to execute its concealed function. Detecting such poisoned samples within vast datasets is virtually impossible through manual inspection. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that enables model training on potentially poisoned datasets by utilizing the power of recent diffusion models. Specifically, we create synthetic variations of all training samples, leveraging the inherent resilience of diffusion models to potential trigger patterns in the data. By combining this generative approach with knowledge distillation, we produce student models that maintain their general performance on the task while exhibiting robust resistance to backdoor triggers.

We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them.

Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of data knowledge, either the dataset which users would use or proxy datasets for a similar task, for implementing the data poisoning procedure. However, in this paper, we find that it is possible to hack the model in a data-free way by modifying one single word embedding vector, with almost no accuracy sacrificed on clean samples. Experimental results on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks show that our method is more efficient and stealthier. We hope this work can raise the awareness of such a critical security risk hidden in the embedding layers of NLP models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/Embedding-Poisoning.

We introduce a new analytical framework to quantify the changes in a machine learning algorithm's output distribution following the inclusion of a few data points in its training set, a notion we define as leave-one-out distinguishability (LOOD). This problem is key to measuring data **memorization** and **information leakage** in machine learning, and the **influence** of training data points on model predictions. We illustrate how our method broadens and refines existing empirical measures of memorization and privacy risks associated with training data. We use Gaussian processes to model the randomness of machine learning algorithms, and validate LOOD with extensive empirical analysis of information leakage using membership inference attacks. Our theoretical framework enables us to investigate the causes of information leakage and where the leakage is high. For example, we analyze the influence of activation functions, on data memorization. Additionally, our method allows us to optimize queries that disclose the most significant information about the training data in the leave-one-out setting. We illustrate how optimal queries can be used for accurate **reconstruction** of training data.

The problem of data contamination is now almost inevitable during the development of large language models (LLMs), with the training data commonly integrating those evaluation benchmarks even unintentionally. This problem subsequently makes it hard to benchmark LLMs fairly. Instead of constructing contamination-free datasets (quite hard), we propose a novel framework, LNE-Blocking, to restore model performance prior to contamination on potentially leaked datasets. Our framework consists of two components: contamination detection and disruption operation. For the prompt, the framework first uses the contamination detection method, LNE, to assess the extent of contamination in the model. Based on this, it adjusts the intensity of the disruption operation, Blocking, to elicit non-memorized responses from the model. Our framework is the first to efficiently restore the model's greedy decoding performance. This comes with a strong performance on multiple datasets with potential leakage risks, and it consistently achieves stable recovery results across different models and varying levels of data contamination. We release the code at https://github.com/RuijieH/LNE-Blocking to facilitate research.

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination (CONDA 2024) focuses on all relevant aspects of data contamination in natural language processing, where data contamination is understood as situations where evaluation data is included in pre-training corpora used to train large scale models, compromising evaluation results. The workshop fostered a shared task to collect evidence on data contamination in current available datasets and models. The goal of the shared task and associated database is to assist the community in understanding the extent of the problem and to assist researchers in avoiding reporting evaluation results on known contaminated resources. The shared task provides a structured, centralized public database for the collection of contamination evidence, open to contributions from the community via GitHub pool requests. This first compilation paper is based on 566 reported entries over 91 contaminated sources from a total of 23 contributors. The details of the individual contamination events are available in the platform. The platform continues to be online, open to contributions from the community.

Automated ad targeting on social media is opaque, creating risks of exploitation and invisibility to external scrutiny. Users may be steered toward harmful content while independent auditing of these processes remains blocked. Large Language Models (LLMs) raise a new concern: the potential to reverse-engineer sensitive user attributes from exposure alone. We introduce a multi-stage auditing framework to investigate these risks. First, a large-scale audit of over 435,000 ad impressions delivered to 891 Australian Facebook users reveals algorithmic biases, including disproportionate Gambling and Politics ads shown to socioeconomically vulnerable and politically aligned groups. Second, a multimodal LLM can reconstruct users' demographic profiles from ad streams, outperforming census-based baselines and matching or exceeding human performance. Our results provide the first empirical evidence that ad streams constitute rich digital footprints for public AI inference, highlighting urgent privacy risks and the need for content-level auditing and governance.

Open-weight AI systems offer unique benefits, including enhanced transparency, open research, and decentralized access. However, they are vulnerable to tampering attacks which can efficiently elicit harmful behaviors by modifying weights or activations. Currently, there is not yet a robust science of open-weight model risk management. Existing safety fine-tuning methods and other post-training techniques have struggled to make LLMs resistant to more than a few dozen steps of adversarial fine-tuning. In this paper, we investigate whether filtering text about dual-use topics from training data can prevent unwanted capabilities and serve as a more tamper-resistant safeguard. We introduce a multi-stage pipeline for scalable data filtering and show that it offers a tractable and effective method for minimizing biothreat proxy knowledge in LLMs. We pretrain multiple 6.9B-parameter models from scratch and find that they exhibit substantial resistance to adversarial fine-tuning attacks on up to 10,000 steps and 300M tokens of biothreat-related text -- outperforming existing post-training baselines by over an order of magnitude -- with no observed degradation to unrelated capabilities. However, while filtered models lack internalized dangerous knowledge, we find that they can still leverage such information when it is provided in context (e.g., via search tool augmentation), demonstrating a need for a defense-in-depth approach. Overall, these findings help to establish pretraining data curation as a promising layer of defense for open-weight AI systems.

Data profiling is an essential process in modern data-driven industries. One of its critical components is the discovery and validation of complex statistics, including functional dependencies, data constraints, association rules, and others. However, most existing data profiling systems that focus on complex statistics do not provide proper integration with the tools used by contemporary data scientists. This creates a significant barrier to the adoption of these tools in the industry. Moreover, existing systems were not created with industrial-grade workloads in mind. Finally, they do not aim to provide descriptive explanations, i.e. why a given pattern is not found. It is a significant issue as it is essential to understand the underlying reasons for a specific pattern's absence to make informed decisions based on the data. Because of that, these patterns are effectively rest in thin air: their application scope is rather limited, they are rarely used by the broader public. At the same time, as we are going to demonstrate in this presentation, complex statistics can be efficiently used to solve many classic data quality problems. Desbordante is an open-source data profiler that aims to close this gap. It is built with emphasis on industrial application: it is efficient, scalable, resilient to crashes, and provides explanations. Furthermore, it provides seamless Python integration by offloading various costly operations to the C++ core, not only mining. In this demonstration, we show several scenarios that allow end users to solve different data quality problems. Namely, we showcase typo detection, data deduplication, and data anomaly detection scenarios.

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 72%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.

Instruction tuning is an effective technique to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents. In this work, we investigate how an adversary can exploit instruction tuning by injecting specific instruction-following examples into the training data that intentionally changes the model's behavior. For example, an adversary can achieve content injection by injecting training examples that mention target content and eliciting such behavior from downstream models. To achieve this goal, we propose AutoPoison, an automated data poisoning pipeline. It naturally and coherently incorporates versatile attack goals into poisoned data with the help of an oracle LLM. We showcase two example attacks: content injection and over-refusal attacks, each aiming to induce a specific exploitable behavior. We quantify and benchmark the strength and the stealthiness of our data poisoning scheme. Our results show that AutoPoison allows an adversary to change a model's behavior by poisoning only a small fraction of data while maintaining a high level of stealthiness in the poisoned examples. We hope our work sheds light on how data quality affects the behavior of instruction-tuned models and raises awareness of the importance of data quality for responsible deployments of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/azshue/AutoPoison.

We question the current evaluation practice on diffusion-based purification methods. Diffusion-based purification methods aim to remove adversarial effects from an input data point at test time. The approach gains increasing attention as an alternative to adversarial training due to the disentangling between training and testing. Well-known white-box attacks are often employed to measure the robustness of the purification. However, it is unknown whether these attacks are the most effective for the diffusion-based purification since the attacks are often tailored for adversarial training. We analyze the current practices and provide a new guideline for measuring the robustness of purification methods against adversarial attacks. Based on our analysis, we further propose a new purification strategy improving robustness compared to the current diffusion-based purification methods.

We present the first systematic approach to static and dynamic taint analysis for Graph APIs focusing on broken access control. The approach comprises the following. We taint nodes in the Graph API if they represent data requiring specific privileges in order to be retrieved or manipulated, and identify API calls which are related to sources and sinks. Then, we statically analyze whether tainted information flow between API source and sink calls occurs. To this end, we model the API calls using graph transformation rules. We subsequently use critical pair analysis to automatically analyze potential dependencies between rules representing source calls and rules representing sink calls. We distinguish direct from indirect tainted information flow and argue under which conditions the CPA is able to detect not only direct, but also indirect tainted flow. The static taint analysis (i) identifies flows that need to be further reviewed, since tainted nodes may be created by an API call and used or manipulated by another API call later without having the necessary privileges, and (ii) can be used to systematically design dynamic security tests for broken access control. The dynamic taint analysis checks if potential broken access control risks detected during the static taint analysis really occur. We apply the approach to a part of the GitHub GraphQL API. The application illustrates that our analysis supports the detection of two types of broken access control systematically: the case where users of the API may not be able to access or manipulate information, although they should be able to do so; and the case where users (or attackers) of the API may be able to access/manipulate information that they should not.

Deep learning models are often trained on distributed, web-scale datasets crawled from the internet. In this paper, we introduce two new dataset poisoning attacks that intentionally introduce malicious examples to a model's performance. Our attacks are immediately practical and could, today, poison 10 popular datasets. Our first attack, split-view poisoning, exploits the mutable nature of internet content to ensure a dataset annotator's initial view of the dataset differs from the view downloaded by subsequent clients. By exploiting specific invalid trust assumptions, we show how we could have poisoned 0.01% of the LAION-400M or COYO-700M datasets for just $60 USD. Our second attack, frontrunning poisoning, targets web-scale datasets that periodically snapshot crowd-sourced content -- such as Wikipedia -- where an attacker only needs a time-limited window to inject malicious examples. In light of both attacks, we notify the maintainers of each affected dataset and recommended several low-overhead defenses.

Question-and-answer agents like ChatGPT offer a novel tool for use as a potential honeypot interface in cyber security. By imitating Linux, Mac, and Windows terminal commands and providing an interface for TeamViewer, nmap, and ping, it is possible to create a dynamic environment that can adapt to the actions of attackers and provide insight into their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The paper illustrates ten diverse tasks that a conversational agent or large language model might answer appropriately to the effects of command-line attacker. The original result features feasibility studies for ten model tasks meant for defensive teams to mimic expected honeypot interfaces with minimal risks. Ultimately, the usefulness outside of forensic activities stems from whether the dynamic honeypot can extend the time-to-conquer or otherwise delay attacker timelines short of reaching key network assets like databases or confidential information. While ongoing maintenance and monitoring may be required, ChatGPT's ability to detect and deflect malicious activity makes it a valuable option for organizations seeking to enhance their cyber security posture. Future work will focus on cybersecurity layers, including perimeter security, host virus detection, and data security.

Domain Adaptation (DA) is a method for enhancing a model's performance on a target domain with inadequate annotated data by applying the information the model has acquired from a related source domain with sufficient labeled data. The escalating enforcement of data-privacy regulations like HIPAA, COPPA, FERPA, etc. have sparked a heightened interest in adapting models to novel domains while circumventing the need for direct access to the source data, a problem known as Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA). In this paper, we propose a novel framework for SFDA that generates source data using a text-to-image diffusion model trained on the target domain samples. Our method starts by training a text-to-image diffusion model on the labeled target domain samples, which is then fine-tuned using the pre-trained source model to generate samples close to the source data. Finally, we use Domain Adaptation techniques to align the artificially generated source data with the target domain data, resulting in significant performance improvements of the model on the target domain. Through extensive comparison against several baselines on the standard Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for the SFDA task.

This paper establishes a mathematically precise definition of dataset poisoning attack and proves that the very act of effectively poisoning a dataset ensures that the attack can be effectively detected. On top of a mathematical guarantee that dataset poisoning is identifiable by a new statistical test that we call the Conformal Separability Test, we provide experimental evidence that we can adequately detect poisoning attempts in the real world.

Dataset ownership verification, the process of determining if a dataset is used in a model's training data, is necessary for detecting unauthorized data usage and data contamination. Existing approaches, such as backdoor watermarking, rely on inducing a detectable behavior into the trained model on a part of the data distribution. However, these approaches have limitations, as they can be harmful to the model's performances or require unpractical access to the model's internals. Most importantly, previous approaches lack guarantee against false positives. This paper introduces data taggants, a novel non-backdoor dataset ownership verification technique. Our method uses pairs of out-of-distribution samples and random labels as secret keys, and leverages clean-label targeted data poisoning to subtly alter a dataset, so that models trained on it respond to the key samples with the corresponding key labels. The keys are built as to allow for statistical certificates with black-box access only to the model. We validate our approach through comprehensive and realistic experiments on ImageNet1k using ViT and ResNet models with state-of-the-art training recipes. Our findings demonstrate that data taggants can reliably make models trained on the protected dataset detectable with high confidence, without compromising validation accuracy, and demonstrates superiority over backdoor watermarking. Moreover, our method shows to be stealthy and robust against various defense mechanisms.

We explore the feasibility and effectiveness of using LLM-driven autonomous systems for Assumed Breach penetration testing in enterprise networks. We introduce a novel prototype that, driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), can compromise accounts within a real-life Active Directory testbed. Our research provides a comprehensive evaluation of the prototype's capabilities, and highlights both strengths and limitations while executing attack. The evaluation uses a realistic simulation environment (Game of Active Directory, GOAD) to capture intricate interactions, stochastic outcomes, and timing dependencies that characterize live network scenarios. The study concludes that autonomous LLMs are able to conduct Assumed Breach simulations, potentially democratizing access to penetration testing for organizations facing budgetary constraints. The prototype's source code, traces, and analyzed logs are released as open-source to enhance collective cybersecurity and facilitate future research in LLM-driven cybersecurity automation.

Penetration testing, a critical component of cybersecurity, typically requires extensive time and effort to find vulnerabilities. Beginners in this field often benefit from collaborative approaches with the community or experts. To address this, we develop CIPHER (Cybersecurity Intelligent Penetration-testing Helper for Ethical Researchers), a large language model specifically trained to assist in penetration testing tasks. We trained CIPHER using over 300 high-quality write-ups of vulnerable machines, hacking techniques, and documentation of open-source penetration testing tools. Additionally, we introduced the Findings, Action, Reasoning, and Results (FARR) Flow augmentation, a novel method to augment penetration testing write-ups to establish a fully automated pentesting simulation benchmark tailored for large language models. This approach fills a significant gap in traditional cybersecurity Q\&A benchmarks and provides a realistic and rigorous standard for evaluating AI's technical knowledge, reasoning capabilities, and practical utility in dynamic penetration testing scenarios. In our assessments, CIPHER achieved the best overall performance in providing accurate suggestion responses compared to other open-source penetration testing models of similar size and even larger state-of-the-art models like Llama 3 70B and Qwen1.5 72B Chat, particularly on insane difficulty machine setups. This demonstrates that the current capabilities of general LLMs are insufficient for effectively guiding users through the penetration testing process. We also discuss the potential for improvement through scaling and the development of better benchmarks using FARR Flow augmentation results. Our benchmark will be released publicly at https://github.com/ibndias/CIPHER.