Nanda Rani
Publications
On the Security of Research Artifacts
Research artifacts are widely shared to support reproducibility, and artifact evaluation (AE) has become common at many leading conferences. However, AE mainly checks whether artifacts work as claimed and can be reproduced. It largely overlooks potential security risks. Since these artifacts are publicly released and reused, they may unintentionally create opportunities for misuse and raise concerns about safe and responsible sharing. We study 509 research artifacts from top-tier security venues and find that many contain insecure code patterns that may introduce potential attack vectors. We propose a taxonomy for context-aware security assessment to enable structured analysis of such risks. We perform static analysis and examine the resulting findings, filtering false positives and identifying real security risks. Our analysis shows that 41.60% of the prevalent findings may pose security concerns under practical usage. To support scalable analysis, we introduce SAFE (Security-Aware Framework for Artifact Evaluation), a first step toward an autonomous framework that analyzes tool-reported findings by considering code semantics, execution context, and practical exploitability. SAFE achieves 84.80% accuracy and 84.63% F1-score in distinguishing security and non-security risks. Overall, our results show that security is also important in AE for promoting safe and responsible research sharing. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nanda-rani/SAFE
CyberExplorer: Benchmarking LLM Offensive Security Capabilities in a Real-World Attacking Simulation Environment
Real-world offensive security operations are inherently open-ended: attackers explore unknown attack surfaces, revise hypotheses under uncertainty, and operate without guaranteed success. Existing LLM-based offensive agent evaluations rely on closed-world settings with predefined goals and binary success criteria. To address this gap, we introduce CyberExplorer, an evaluation suite with two core components: (1) an open-environment benchmark built on a virtual machine hosting 40 vulnerable web services derived from real-world CTF challenges, where agents autonomously perform reconnaissance, target selection, and exploitation without prior knowledge of vulnerability locations; and (2) a reactive multi-agent framework supporting dynamic exploration without predefined plans. CyberExplorer enables fine-grained evaluation beyond flag recovery, capturing interaction dynamics, coordination behavior, failure modes, and vulnerability discovery signals-bridging the gap between benchmarks and realistic multi-target attack scenarios.