cs.CRMar 2, 2026

ZeroDayBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Unseen Zero-Day Vulnerabilities for Cyberdefense

Authors: Nancy Lau, Louis Sloot, Jyoutir Raj, Giuseppe Marco Boscardin, Evan Harris, Dylan Bowman, Mario Brajkovski, Jaideep Chawla, 

Organizations: UC Santa Cruz · Carnegie Mellon University · Independent · HUD · 

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed as software engineering agents that autonomously contribute to repositories. A major benefit these agents present is their ability to find and patch security vulnerabilities in the codebases they oversee. To estimate the capability of agents in this domain, we introduce ZeroDayBench, a benchmark where LLM agents find and patch 22 novel critical vulnerabilities in open-source codebases. We focus our efforts on three popular frontier agentic LLMs: GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4.1. We find that frontier LLMs are not yet capable of autonomously solving our tasks and observe some behavioral patterns that suggest how these models can be improved in the domain of proactive cyberdefense.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

May 26, 2026

SEC-bench Pro: Can Language Models Solve Long-Horizon Software Security Tasks?

Large language models (LLMs) now support automated software security tasks, including vulnerability discovery and proof-of-concept (PoC) generation. Existing benchmarks do not faithfully evaluate LLMs in real-world bug hunting scenarios because they rely on fuzzing harnesses, target-specific descriptions, or vulnerability-reproduction tasks. We present SEC-bench Pro, a benchmark for measuring agent bug hunting on critical, high-complexity software systems. This work discloses reports with concrete PoC inputs and links fixes into reproducible tasks through a three-phase pipeline for vulnerability collection, environment reconstruction, and oracle-based validation. We instantiate SEC-bench Pro with 183 validated vulnerabilities across V8 and SpiderMonkey, including a V8 subset with more than $1.5 million in cumulative Google Vulnerability Reward Program awards. These instances span memory-safety, sandbox, JIT, and race-condition bugs under browser-grade and runtime-grade execution conditions. Our evaluation shows that coding agents with frontier models remain below 40% success on both evaluated engines. The open-weight Kimi-K2.6 baseline reaches 11.7% on V8, while the strongest frontier configuration reaches 32.0% on V8 and 38.8% on SpiderMonkey. ClaudeCode and Codex solve complementary instance sets, and their two-agent union reaches 37.9% on V8 and 48.8% on SpiderMonkey. SEC-bench Pro provides robust environments for assessing LLM-based security agents and exposes limitations in long-horizon bug hunting tasks.
Aug 6, 2026

CyberForge: Verified Vulnerability Injection at Repository Level for Cybersecurity Agent Training

Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software. Generally available agents can already aid attackers, who only need to find one exploitable weakness, while defenders must continuously identify and patch all vulnerabilities across fast-growing codebases. Stronger defensive agents would help close this gap, yet the scarcity of security training data with reproducible build and execution environments remains a bottleneck. We present CyberForge, a framework that synthesizes executable, repository-level security training data by injecting vulnerabilities into real C/C++ projects. It validates each instance dynamically: the injected build must pass the project's unit tests, and generated proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) must trigger on the injected build and not on the clean one. CyberForge is not limited by the availability of disclosed vulnerabilities, therefore it can scale in comparison to data augmentation techniques which rely on historic CVE data. The resulting corpus holds 1034 validated vulnerabilities across 80 projects and 63 weakness categories, with edit locality similar to real CVE patches under a real-versus-real noise floor. Fine-tuning on trajectories collected over this corpus improves SEC-bench patch repair by +3.3 to +14.7 points, in all six configurations of three model scales and two teachers, with the 31B student reaching its GPT-5.4-mini teacher, 72.7% against 74.0%. These gains generalize out of distribution to PatchEval, a corpus containing other programming languages, where every configuration also improves and the 31B student passes its teacher.
Oct 24, 2026

Can Agentic Code Review Catch Vulnerabilities Before They Are Merged?

LLM agents have been increasingly adopted for security-focused code review, but existing benchmarks mostly derive the reviewed changes from their later fixes instead of the real-world bug-introducing commits. In this paper, we present SecPRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating agentic security review on validated real-world code changes. More specifically, we have built an automated agentic pipeline to autonomously harvest, build, and validate massive real-world bug-introducing commits for popular software systems. To ensure precise evaluation, we also adopt LLM-as-a-judge to credit the findings matching ground-truth vulnerabilities. To date, we have collected 265 tasks from nine critical systems, including Firefox, V8, and OpenSSL with millions of lines of code. Across eight frontier models, recall ranges from 32.5% to 78.1%, with Grok 4.6 and GPT-6 sol ranking at the top. Our study also shows that most misses are not simply oversights: in 68% of them, the agent reports on a file that holds the flaw but argues for a different mechanism. Security-focused harnesses also behave differently: OpenAI's Codex Security lowers recall by 8.3 points, mostly by abstaining, while Anthropic's Defending Code harness raises it by 7.7 points, at a higher cost.