Automatic exploit generation (AEG) refers to the automatic discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities against unknown targets. Traditional AEG often targets a single type of vulnerability and still relies on templates built from expert experience. To achieve intelligent exploit generation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark using Binary Exploitation (pwn) challenges in Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and investigate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in AEG based on the benchmark. To improve the performance of AEG, we propose PwnGPT, an LLM-based automatic exploit generation framework that automatically solves pwn challenges. The structural design of PwnGPT is divided into three main components: analysis, generation, and verification modules. With the help of a modular approach and structured problem inputs, PwnGPT can solve challenges that LLMs cannot directly solve. We evaluate PwnGPT on our benchmark and analyze the outputs of each module. Experimental results show that our framework is highly autonomous and capable of addressing various challenges. Compared to direct input LLMs, PwnGPT increases the completion rate of exploit on our benchmark from 26.3% to 57.9% with the OpenAI o1-preview model and from 21.1% to 36.8% with the GPT-4o model.

Accurate and efficient localization of root cause instances in large-scale microservice systems is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, prevailing methods face several limitations. Notably, some recent methods rely on supervised learning which necessitates a substantial amount of labeled data. However, labeling root cause instances is time-consuming and laborious, especially with multiple modalities of data including logs, traces, metrics, and so on. Moreover, some approaches favor deep learning for localization but lack interpretability and continuous improvement mechanisms. To address the above challenges, we propose DeepHunt , a novel root cause localization method based on multimodal data analysis. Firstly, DeepHunt introduces root cause score (RCS) by integrating reconstruction errors and failure propagation patterns (upstream–downstream relationships), imparting interpretability to the localization of root causes. Then, it embraces graph autoencoder (GAE) to address the limitation imposed by scarce labeled data. It employs data augmentation to mitigate the adverse effects of insufficient historical training samples. We evaluate DeepHunt on two open source datasets, and it outperforms existing methods when facing a zero-label cold start. DeepHunt can be further improved by continuously fine-tuning through a feedback mechanism.

The backdoor attack on deep neural network models implants malicious data patterns in a model to induce attacker-desirable behaviors. Existing defense methods fall into the online and offline categories, in which the offline models achieve state-of-the-art detection rates but are restricted by heavy computation overhead. In contrast, their more deployable online counterparts lack the means to detect source-specific backdoors with large sizes. This work proposes a new online backdoor detection method—Reverse Backdoor Distillation (RBD) to handle issues associated with source-specific and source-agnostic backdoor attacks. RBD, designed with the novel perspective of distilling instead of erasing backdoor knowledge, is a complementary backdoor detection methodology that can be used in conjunction with other online backdoor defenses. Considering the fact that trigger data will cause overwhelming neuron activation while clean data will not, RBD distills backdoor attack pattern knowledge from a suspicious model to create a shadow model, which is subsequently deployed online along with the original model in scope to predict a backdoor attack. We extensively evaluate RBD on several datasets (MNIST, GTSRB, CIFAR-10) with diverse model architectures and trigger patterns. RBD outperforms online benchmarks in all experimental settings. Notably, RBD demonstrates superior capability in detecting source-specific attacks, where comparison methods fail, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed technique. Moreover, RBD achieves a computational savings of at least 97%.

Microservices improve the scalability and flexibility of monolithic architectures to accommodate the evolution of software systems, but the complexity and dynamics of microservices challenge system reliability. Ensuring microservice quality requires efficient failure diagnosis, including detection and triage. Failure detection involves identifying anomalous behavior within the system, while triage entails classifying the failure type and directing it to the engineering team for resolution. Unfortunately, current approaches reliant on single-modal monitoring data, such as metrics, logs, or traces, cannot capture all failures and neglect interconnections among multimodal data, leading to erroneous diagnoses. Recent multimodal data fusion studies struggle to achieve deep integration, limiting diagnostic accuracy due to insufficiently captured interdependencies. Therefore, we proposeUniDiag, which leverages temporal knowledge graphs to fuse multimodal data for effective failure diagnosis.UniDiagapplies a simple yet effective stream-based anomaly detection method to reduce computational cost and a novel microservice-oriented graph embedding method to represent the state of systems comprehensively. To assess the performance ofUniDiag, we conduct extensive evaluation experiments using datasets from two benchmark microservice systems, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods and affirming the efficacy of multimodal data fusion. Additionally, we have publicly made the code and data available to facilitate further research.