computer and communication security
How to Securely Shuffle? A survey about Secure Shufflers for privacy-preserving computations
Damie, Marc, Hahn, Florian, Peter, Andreas, Ramon, Jan
Ishai et al. (FOCS'06) introduced secure shuffling as an efficient building block for private data aggregation. Recently, the field of differential privacy has revived interest in secure shufflers by highlighting the privacy amplification they can provide in various computations. Although several works argue for the utility of secure shufflers, they often treat them as black boxes; overlooking the practical vulnerabilities and performance trade-offs of existing implementations. This leaves a central question open: what makes a good secure shuffler? This survey addresses that question by identifying, categorizing, and comparing 26 secure protocols that realize the necessary shuffling functionality. To enable a meaningful comparison, we adapt and unify existing security definitions into a consistent set of properties. We also present an overview of privacy-preserving technologies that rely on secure shufflers, offer practical guidelines for selecting appropriate protocols, and outline promising directions for future work.
Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks
Deng, Xinhao, Chen, Jingyou, Yu, Linxiao, Zhang, Yixiang, Gu, Zhongyi, Qiu, Changhao, Zhao, Xiyuan, Xu, Ke, Li, Qi
Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, overlooking the complexity of real-world environments. This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions, including defense mechanisms, traffic drift, multi-tab browsing, early-stage detection, open-world settings, and few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that many WF techniques with strong performance in isolated settings degrade significantly when facing other conditions. Since real-world environments often combine multiple challenges, current WF attacks are difficult to apply directly in practice. This study highlights the limitations of WF attacks and introduces a multidimensional evaluation framework, offering critical insights for developing more robust and practical WF attacks.
We Urgently Need Privilege Management in MCP: A Measurement of API Usage in MCP Ecosystems
Li, Zhihao, Li, Kun, Ma, Boyang, Xu, Minghui, Zhang, Yue, Cheng, Xiuzhen
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a widely adopted mechanism for connecting large language models to external tools and resources. While MCP promises seamless extensibility and rich integrations, it also introduces a substantially expanded attack surface: any plugin can inherit broad system privileges with minimal isolation or oversight. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of MCP security risks. We develop an automated static analysis framework and systematically examine 2,562 real-world MCP applications spanning 23 functional categories. Our measurements reveal that network and system resource APIs dominate usage patterns, affecting 1,438 and 1,237 servers respectively, while file and memory resources are less frequent but still significant. We find that Developer Tools and API Development plugins are the most API-intensive, and that less popular plugins often contain disproportionately high-risk operations. Through concrete case studies, we demonstrate how insufficient privilege separation enables privilege escalation, misinformation propagation, and data tampering. Based on these findings, we propose a detailed taxonomy of MCP resource access, quantify security-relevant API usage, and identify open challenges for building safer MCP ecosystems, including dynamic permission models and automated trust assessment.
IP Leakage Attacks Targeting LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Wang, Liwen, Wang, Wenxuan, Wang, Shuai, Li, Zongjie, Ji, Zhenlan, Lyu, Zongyi, Wu, Daoyuan, Cheung, Shing-Chi
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the emergence of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to perform complex tasks through collaboration. However, the intricate nature of MAS, including their architecture and agent interactions, raises significant concerns regarding intellectual property (IP) protection. In this paper, we introduce MASLEAK, a novel attack framework designed to extract sensitive information from MAS applications. MASLEAK targets a practical, black-box setting, where the adversary has no prior knowledge of the MAS architecture or agent configurations. The adversary can only interact with the MAS through its public API, submitting attack query $q$ and observing outputs from the final agent. Inspired by how computer worms propagate and infect vulnerable network hosts, MASLEAK carefully crafts adversarial query $q$ to elicit, propagate, and retain responses from each MAS agent that reveal a full set of proprietary components, including the number of agents, system topology, system prompts, task instructions, and tool usages. We construct the first synthetic dataset of MAS applications with 810 applications and also evaluate MASLEAK against real-world MAS applications, including Coze and CrewAI. MASLEAK achieves high accuracy in extracting MAS IP, with an average attack success rate of 87% for system prompts and task instructions, and 92% for system architecture in most cases. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and the potential defenses.
A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment
Wang, Kun, Zhang, Guibin, Zhou, Zhenhong, Wu, Jiahao, Yu, Miao, Zhao, Shiqian, Yin, Chenlong, Fu, Jinhu, Yan, Yibo, Luo, Hanjun, Lin, Liang, Xu, Zhihao, Lu, Haolang, Cao, Xinye, Zhou, Xinyun, Jin, Weifei, Meng, Fanci, Xu, Shicheng, Mao, Junyuan, Wang, Yu, Wu, Hao, Wang, Minghe, Zhang, Fan, Fang, Junfeng, Qu, Wenjie, Liu, Yue, Liu, Chengwei, Zhang, Yifan, Li, Qiankun, Guo, Chongye, Qin, Yalan, Fan, Zhaoxin, Wang, Kai, Ding, Yi, Hong, Donghai, Ji, Jiaming, Lai, Yingxin, Yu, Zitong, Li, Xinfeng, Jiang, Yifan, Li, Yanhui, Deng, Xinyu, Wu, Junlin, Wang, Dongxia, Huang, Yihao, Guo, Yufei, Huang, Jen-tse, Wang, Qiufeng, Jin, Xiaolong, Wang, Wenxuan, Liu, Dongrui, Yue, Yanwei, Huang, Wenke, Wan, Guancheng, Chang, Heng, Li, Tianlin, Yu, Yi, Li, Chenghao, Li, Jiawei, Bai, Lei, Zhang, Jie, Guo, Qing, Wang, Jingyi, Chen, Tianlong, Zhou, Joey Tianyi, Jia, Xiaojun, Sun, Weisong, Wu, Cong, Chen, Jing, Hu, Xuming, Li, Yiming, Wang, Xiao, Zhang, Ningyu, Tuan, Luu Anh, Xu, Guowen, Zhang, Jiaheng, Zhang, Tianwei, Ma, Xingjun, Gu, Jindong, Pang, Liang, Wang, Xiang, An, Bo, Sun, Jun, Bansal, Mohit, Pan, Shirui, Lyu, Lingjuan, Elovici, Yuval, Kailkhura, Bhavya, Yang, Yaodong, Li, Hongwei, Xu, Wenyuan, Sun, Yizhou, Wang, Wei, Li, Qing, Tang, Ke, Jiang, Yu-Gang, Juefei-Xu, Felix, Xiong, Hui, Wang, Xiaofeng, Tao, Dacheng, Yu, Philip S., Wen, Qingsong, Liu, Yang
The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.
Watermarking across Modalities for Content Tracing and Generative AI
This technology has important applications in many challenges of the industry such as content moderation, tracing AI-generated content, and monitoring the usage of AI models. The contributions of this thesis include the development of new watermarking techniques for images, audio, and text. We first introduce methods for active moderation of images on social platforms. We then develop specific techniques for AI-generated content. We specifically demonstrate methods to adapt latent generative models to embed watermarks in all generated content, identify watermarked sections in speech, and improve watermarking in large language models with tests that ensure low false positive rates. Furthermore, we explore the use of digital watermarking to detect model misuse, including the detection of watermarks in language models fine-tuned on watermarked text, and introduce training-free watermarks for the weights of large transformers. Through these contributions, the thesis provides effective solutions for the challenges posed by the increasing use of generative AI models and the need for model monitoring and content moderation. It finally examines the challenges and limitations of watermarking techniques and discuss potential future directions for research in this area.