ServeGuard: Verifiable, Bounded-Residual Confinement of Operator-Invisible Channels Without Revealing the Certified Read Factor
Third-party adapters for open-weight language models ship as opaque weight matrices; a recipient cannot check whether an adapter hides a backdoor without trusting the publisher or inspecting the weights, the publisher's core asset. For one important class (payloads placed where a safety monitor is structurally blind), detection is unsound as a defense: every detector that factors through the declared monitor is invariant on its blind subspace, and honest and backdoored adapters overlap on every blind-subspace statistic we evaluate, because benign adaptation uses that subspace too. Rather than detect this channel, we make it structurally \emph{absent} and prove that we did. The publisher b...
| Authors | Dominik Dahlem, Rui Vieira |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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