Hyrum Anderson

Nicholas Carlini, Matthew Jagielski, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo et al. · deepmind, eth-zurich

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.

Anay Mehrotra, Manolis Zampetakis, Paul Kassianik et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) display versatile functionality, they continue to generate harmful, biased, and toxic content, as demonstrated by the prevalence of human-designed jailbreaks. In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM. TAP utilizes an attacker LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts until one of the refined prompts jailbreaks the target. In addition, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks, reducing the number of queries sent to the target LLM. In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4-Turbo and GPT4o) for more than 80% of the prompts. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box methods for generating jailbreaks while using a smaller number of queries than them. Furthermore, TAP is also capable of jailbreaking LLMs protected by state-of-the-art guardrails, e.g., LlamaGuard.

Paul Kassianik, Baturay Saglam, Alexander Chen et al.

As transformer-based large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate society, they have revolutionized domains such as software engineering, creative writing, and digital arts. However, their adoption in cybersecurity remains limited due to challenges like scarcity of specialized training data and complexity of representing cybersecurity-specific knowledge. To address these gaps, we present Foundation-Sec-8B, a cybersecurity-focused LLM built on the Llama 3.1 architecture and enhanced through continued pretraining on a carefully curated cybersecurity corpus. We evaluate Foundation-Sec-8B across both established and new cybersecurity benchmarks, showing that it matches Llama 3.1-70B and GPT-4o-mini in certain cybersecurity-specific tasks. By releasing our model to the public, we aim to accelerate progress and adoption of AI-driven tools in both public and private cybersecurity contexts.

Robert J. Joyce, Gideon Miller, Phil Roth et al.

A lack of accessible data has historically restricted malware analysis research, and practitioners have relied heavily on datasets provided by industry sources to advance. Existing public datasets are limited by narrow scope - most include files targeting a single platform, have labels supporting just one type of malware classification task, and make no effort to capture the evasive files that make malware detection difficult in practice. We present EMBER2024, a new dataset that enables holistic evaluation of malware classifiers. Created in collaboration with the authors of EMBER2017 and EMBER2018, the EMBER2024 dataset includes hashes, metadata, feature vectors, and labels for more than 3.2 million files from six file formats. Our dataset supports the training and evaluation of machine learning models on seven malware classification tasks, including malware detection, malware family classification, and malware behavior identification. EMBER2024 is the first to include a collection of malicious files that initially went undetected by a set of antivirus products, creating a "challenge" set to assess classifier performance against evasive malware. This work also introduces EMBER feature version 3, with added support for several new feature types. We are releasing the EMBER2024 dataset to promote reproducibility and empower researchers in the pursuit of new malware research topics.

Mayana Pereira, Rahul Dodhia, Hyrum Anderson et al.

Child Sexual Abuse Media (CSAM) is any visual record of a sexually-explicit activity involving minors. CSAM impacts victims differently from the actual abuse because the distribution never ends, and images are permanent. Machine learning-based solutions can help law enforcement quickly identify CSAM and block digital distribution. However, collecting CSAM imagery to train machine learning models has many ethical and legal constraints, creating a barrier to research development. With such restrictions in place, the development of CSAM machine learning detection systems based on file metadata uncovers several opportunities. Metadata is not a record of a crime, and it does not have legal restrictions. Therefore, investing in detection systems based on metadata can increase the rate of discovery of CSAM and help thousands of victims. We propose a framework for training and evaluating deployment-ready machine learning models for CSAM identification. Our framework provides guidelines to evaluate CSAM detection models against intelligent adversaries and models' performance with open data. We apply the proposed framework to the problem of CSAM detection based on file paths. In our experiments, the best-performing model is based on convolutional neural networks and achieves an accuracy of 0.97. Our evaluation shows that the CNN model is robust against offenders actively trying to evade detection by evaluating the model against adversarially modified data. Experiments with open datasets confirm that the model generalizes well and is deployment-ready.

Edward Raff, William Fleming, Richard Zak et al.

N-grams have been a common tool for information retrieval and machine learning applications for decades. In nearly all previous works, only a few values of $n$ are tested, with $n > 6$ being exceedingly rare. Larger values of $n$ are not tested due to computational burden or the fear of overfitting. In this work, we present a method to find the top-$k$ most frequent $n$-grams that is 60$\times$ faster for small $n$, and can tackle large $n\geq1024$. Despite the unprecedented size of $n$ considered, we show how these features still have predictive ability for malware classification tasks. More important, large $n$-grams provide benefits in producing features that are interpretable by malware analysis, and can be used to create general purpose signatures compatible with industry standard tools like Yara. Furthermore, the counts of common $n$-grams in a file may be added as features to publicly available human-engineered features that rival efficacy of professionally-developed features when used to train gradient-boosted decision tree models on the EMBER dataset.

Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark et al.

This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. After analyzing the ways in which AI may influence the threat landscape in the digital, physical, and political domains, we make four high-level recommendations for AI researchers and other stakeholders. We also suggest several promising areas for further research that could expand the portfolio of defenses, or make attacks less effective or harder to execute. Finally, we discuss, but do not conclusively resolve, the long-term equilibrium of attackers and defenders.