# Contextualizing Sink Knowledge for Java Vulnerability Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01645/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FORGE: Multi-Agent Graduated Exploitation and Detection Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03453/) (2026)
- [The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-End](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Java applications are prone to vulnerabilities stemming from the insecure use of security-sensitive APIs, such as file operations enabling path traversal or deserialization routines allowing remote code execution. These sink APIs encode critical information for vulnerability discovery: the program-specific constraints required to reach them and the exploitation conditions necessary to trigger security flaws. Despite this, existing fuzzers largely overlook such vulnerability-specific knowledge, limiting their effectiveness. We present GONDAR, a sink-centric fuzzing framework that systematically leverages sink API semantics for targeted vulnerability discovery. GONDAR first identifies reachable and exploitable sink call sites through CWE-specific scanning combined with LLM-assisted static filtering. It then deploys two specialized agents that work collaboratively with a coverage-guided fuzzer: an exploration agent generates inputs to reach target call sites by iteratively solving path constraints, while an exploitation agent synthesizes proof-of-concept exploits by reasoning about and satisfying vulnerability-triggering conditions. The agents and fuzzer continuously exchange seeds and runtime feedback, complementing each other. We evaluated GONDAR on real-world Java benchmarks, where it discovers four times more vulnerabilities than Jazzer, the state-of-the-art Java fuzzer. Notably, an earlier GONDAR version contributed to Team Atlanta's first-place CRS in the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge, and is integrated into OSS-CRS, a sandbox project in The Linux Foundation's OpenSSF, to analyze open-source Java projects, where it has already uncovered a zero-day vulnerability.
