Cheap to Hypothesize, Costly to Verify: The Defense Surface of Agentic Vulnerability Discovery
Autonomous LLM agents turn vulnerability discovery into a repository-scale search: they generate many vulnerability hypotheses but can verify only a subset under a finite budget. We show that autonomous vulnerability discovery exhibits a hypothesis-verification asymmetry, where verifying a candidate hypothesis through reachability analysis, execution, and proof-of-concept construction is substantially more expensive than forming it. Under a finite resource budget, this makes autonomous discovery a resource-bounded selective-verification process, further exposing verification effort as a unique defense surface. We present RedHerring, which inserts certifiably safe decoys that divert verifi...
| Authors | Kaikai Zhang, Zihan Zhang, Yuchong Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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