Cover image

Keys to the Kingdom: How LLMs Can Audit Crypto Logic Before It Breaks

We’ve gotten good at spotting API misuse in crypto code (think “don’t use ECB,” “don’t hardcode IVs”). But many production failures don’t come from the obvious API call—they’re born in the logic that surrounds it: the parameter checks, corner-case math, and brittle “optimizations.” That’s where CryptoScope steps in: an LLM-powered framework that reads crypto code like a human auditor, guided by a domain corpus and structured prompts, to uncover logic-level vulnerabilities without executing the code. ...

August 18, 2025 · 4 min · Zelina
Cover image

The LoRA Mirage: Why Lightweight Finetuning Isn't Lightweight on Privacy

When we talk about parameter-efficient fine-tuning, LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is often celebrated as a silver bullet: cost-effective, memory-efficient, and—many assume—safe. After all, it modifies only a small fraction of model parameters, sideloaded as low-rank matrices, while leaving the massive pretrained model backbone untouched. The prevailing belief has been that such minimal intervention can’t possibly memorize or leak sensitive data. This belief is now decisively debunked by LoRA-Leak, a landmark framework introduced in a new paper by researchers from Tsinghua and HKUST. Their findings are a wake-up call for AI developers and policymakers alike: even LoRA-finetuned models are highly vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs)—and ironically, the very presence of the frozen pretrained model amplifies this leakage risk. ...

July 25, 2025 · 4 min · Zelina