Machine learning-based supervised classifiers are widely used for security tasks, and their improvement has been largely focused on algorithmic advancements. Data challenges that negatively impact the performance of these classifiers have received limited attention. We address the following research question: Can developments in Generative AI (GenAI) address data challenges and improve classifier performance? We propose augmenting training datasets with synthetic data generated using GenAI techniques to improve classifier generalization. We evaluate this approach across 7 diverse security tasks using 6 state-of-the-art GenAI methods and introduce a novel GenAI scheme called Nimai that enables highly controlled data synthesis. We find that GenAI techniques can significantly improve the performance of security classifiers, achieving improvements of up to 32.6% even in severely data-constrained settings (only ~180 training samples). Furthermore, we demonstrate that GenAI can facilitate rapid adaptation to concept drift post-deployment, requiring minimal labeling in the adjustment process. Despite successes, our study finds that some GenAI schemes struggle to initialize (train and produce data) on certain security tasks. We also identify characteristics of specific tasks, such as noisy labels, overlapping class distributions, and sparse feature vectors, which hinder performance boost using GenAI. We believe that our study will drive the development of future GenAI tools designed for security tasks.

Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors. In this work, we introduce Optimus, a novel defense framework designed to mitigate fine-tuning harms while preserving conversational utility. Unlike existing defenses that rely heavily on precise toxicity detection or restrictive filtering, Optimus addresses the critical challenge of ensuring robust mitigation even when toxicity classifiers are imperfect or biased. Optimus integrates a training-free toxicity classification scheme that repurposes the safety alignment of commodity LLMs, and employs a dual-strategy alignment process combining synthetic ''healing data'' with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to efficiently steer models toward safety. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Optimus mitigates toxicity even when relying on extremely biased classifiers (with up to 85% degradation in Recall). Optimus outperforms the state-of-the-art defense StarDSS and exhibits strong resilience against adaptive adversarial and jailbreak attacks. Our source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/secml-lab-vt/Optimus

Deepfake or synthetic images produced using deep generative models pose serious risks to online platforms. This has triggered several research efforts to accurately detect deepfake images, achieving excellent performance on publicly available deepfake datasets. In this work, we study 8 state-of-the-art detectors and argue that they are far from being ready for deployment due to two recent developments. First, the emergence of lightweight methods to customize large generative models, can enable an attacker to create many customized generators (to create deepfakes), thereby substantially increasing the threat surface. We show that existing defenses fail to generalize well to such user-customized generative models that are publicly available today. We discuss new machine learning approaches based on content-agnostic features, and ensemble modeling to improve generalization performance against user-customized models. Second, the emergence of vision foundation models—machine learning models trained on broad data that can be easily adapted to several downstream tasks—can be misused by attackers to craft adversarial deepfakes that can evade existing defenses. We propose a simple adversarial attack that leverages existing foundation models to craft adversarial samples without adding any adversarial noise, through careful semantic manipulation of the image content. We highlight the vulnerabilities of several defenses against our attack, and explore directions leveraging advanced foundation models and adversarial training to defend against this new threat.

Chatbot systems have improved significantly because of the advances made in language modeling. These machine learning systems follow an end-to-end data-driven learning paradigm and are trained on large conversational datasets. Imperfections or harmful biases in the training datasets can cause the models to learn toxic behavior, and thereby expose their users to harmful responses. Prior work has focused on measuring the inherent toxicity of such chatbots, by devising queries that are more likely to produce toxic responses. In this work, we ask the question: How easy or hard is it to inject toxicity into a chatbot after deployment? We study this in a practical scenario known as Dialog-based Learning (DBL), where a chatbot is periodically trained on recent conversations with its users after deployment. A DBL setting can be exploited to poison the training dataset for each training cycle. Our attacks would allow an adversary to manipulate the degree of toxicity in a model and also enable control over what type of queries can trigger a toxic response. Our fully automated attacks only require LLM-based software agents masquerading as (malicious) users to inject high levels of toxicity. We systematically explore the vulnerability of popular chatbot pipelines to this threat. Lastly, we show that several existing toxicity mitigation strategies (designed for chatbots) can be significantly weakened by adaptive attackers.

Existing methods to manage privileges in smart home systems have not considered allocating privileges to users based on (i) the relationship of the user with the device, (ii) the location and risk of the device and (iii) the current environment. In this work, we take a multi perspective view on the problem of sharing fine-grained privileges of IoT devices among multiple users in a smart home. We propose the concepts of user role (subset of privileges specific to each device), tasks and security levels (labels for each privilege) to allot right privileges to users. Thereby, limiting the exploitation of privileges assigned to legitimate insiders of the house. Thus, our work matches the aspirations of previous surveys on building a comprehensive access control system to manage privileges in a shared smart home.