SecureForge: Finding and Preventing Vulnerabilities in LLM-Generated Code via Prompt Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Houjun, Einstein, Lisa, Yang, John, Baumann, Joachim, Eddy, Duncan, Manning, Christopher D., Kochenderfer, Mykel, Yang, Diyi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Liu, Houjun
Einstein, Lisa
Yang, John
Baumann, Joachim
Eddy, Duncan
Manning, Christopher D.
Kochenderfer, Mykel
Yang, Diyi
author_facet Liu, Houjun
Einstein, Lisa
Yang, John
Baumann, Joachim
Eddy, Duncan
Manning, Christopher D.
Kochenderfer, Mykel
Yang, Diyi
contents LLM coding agents now generate code at an unprecedented scale, yet LLM-generated code introduces cybersecurity vulnerabilities into codebases without human involvement. Even when frontier models are explicitly asked to write secure production code with relevant weaknesses to avoid in context, we find that they still produce verifiable vulnerabilities on average 23% of the time across a corpus of 250 benign coding prompts. We introduce SecureForge, an automated pipeline that both audits security risks of frontier models and produces auditing-informed secure system prompts that reduce output security vulnerabilities while maintaining unit test performance. SecureForge first identifies benign prompts that produce statically detectable vulnerabilities, and then amplifies them into a large synthetic prompt corpus of diverse scenarios using a Markovian sampling technique to jointly maintain error rates and prompt diversity. This corpus is then used to iteratively optimize the system prompts to reduce output security vulnerabilities. On frontier models, SecureForge yields a statistically significant Pareto improvement in both unit test success and output security, with output vulnerabilities reduced by up to 48%. The resulting system prompts transfer zero-shot to in-the-wild coding agent prompts, without any exposure to real user prompt distributions during optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SecureForge: Finding and Preventing Vulnerabilities in LLM-Generated Code via Prompt Optimization
Liu, Houjun
Einstein, Lisa
Yang, John
Baumann, Joachim
Eddy, Duncan
Manning, Christopher D.
Kochenderfer, Mykel
Yang, Diyi
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
LLM coding agents now generate code at an unprecedented scale, yet LLM-generated code introduces cybersecurity vulnerabilities into codebases without human involvement. Even when frontier models are explicitly asked to write secure production code with relevant weaknesses to avoid in context, we find that they still produce verifiable vulnerabilities on average 23% of the time across a corpus of 250 benign coding prompts. We introduce SecureForge, an automated pipeline that both audits security risks of frontier models and produces auditing-informed secure system prompts that reduce output security vulnerabilities while maintaining unit test performance. SecureForge first identifies benign prompts that produce statically detectable vulnerabilities, and then amplifies them into a large synthetic prompt corpus of diverse scenarios using a Markovian sampling technique to jointly maintain error rates and prompt diversity. This corpus is then used to iteratively optimize the system prompts to reduce output security vulnerabilities. On frontier models, SecureForge yields a statistically significant Pareto improvement in both unit test success and output security, with output vulnerabilities reduced by up to 48%. The resulting system prompts transfer zero-shot to in-the-wild coding agent prompts, without any exposure to real user prompt distributions during optimization.
title SecureForge: Finding and Preventing Vulnerabilities in LLM-Generated Code via Prompt Optimization
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08382