Hybrid Vulnerability Discovery in the Wild: Automated Screening, Fine-Tuned LLMs, and Four Published CVEs
Automated security scanners produce many alerts, but disclosure requires evidence of attacker control, reachability, impact, and reproducibility. We present an evidence-gated workflow that screens recently updated Python AI/ML and data-science packages then uses two separately fine-tuned open-weight agents to distinguish vulnerability plausibility from CVE worthiness: the first tests attacker control and reachability, and the second assesses novelty and impact before human proof-of-concept validation and coordinated disclosure. In a targeted campaign covering 400 packages, screening yielded 1292 clustered signals; the agents retained 96 vulnerability hypotheses, including 65 provisional CVE candidates. All 13 Critical or High candidates were reproduced with benign proofs of concept and acknowledged by a CVE Numbering Authority as valid security findings. As of 30 September 2026, four had published CVEs affecting OpenMed, Python StateMachine, uproot, and SpeechBrain; five had maintainer-acknowledged patches in progress; and four awaited maintainer response. Field detection accuracy was not measured.
Authors
- Lior Shamir (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6207-1491)
- Sai Teja Erukude (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0375-9813)
Institutions
- Kansas State University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Electronics
- Published
- 2026-10-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15204727
- Primary Topic
- Web Application Security Vulnerabilities
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00