Cheap to Hypothesize, Costly to Verify: The Defense Surface of Agentic Vulnerability Discovery

arXiv:2609.35909 · cs.CR, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-28 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-28

Updated: 2026-10-07

Project page: https://xxbai.space/redherring

Terminology

• Verification — 93× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 11× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy — 3× in this paper
• AI Agents — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• International Conference on Machine Learning — 2× in this paper
• Ablation study — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Analyzer — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing — 1× in this paper
• Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science — 1× in this paper
• Decode — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Dependable Systems and Networks — 1× in this paper
• International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization — 1× in this paper
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

Sources

• Trust Me, I Know This Function: Hijacking LLM Static Analysis using Bias
• DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence
• Clawdrain: Exploiting Tool-Calling Chains for Stealthy Token Exhaustion in OpenClaw Agents
• GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
• Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
• Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
• CoTDeceptor:Adversarial Code Obfuscation Against CoT-Enhanced LLM Code Agents
• A Systematic Study of Code Obfuscation Against LLM-based Vulnerability Detection
• OTora: A Unified Red Teaming Framework for Reasoning-Level Denial-of-Service in LLM Agents
• Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks
• LLM Agent Honeypot: Monitoring AI Hacking Agents in the Wild
• On Secure and Usable Program Obfuscation: A Survey

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