mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2605.26548 ↗First posted 26 May 2026cs.CR cs.LGcited by 8

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Finding a real vulnerability in complicated systems is a challenging, long-horizon task that demands reasoning across an entire codebase to produce a working proof-of-concept (PoC). However, such critical security problems remain understudied. We present SEC-bench Pro, a benchmark that measures how well frontier models hunt real vulnerabilities by reproducing working PoC inputs from disclosed reports, where each task pairs a concrete bug with the instructions for triggering it. We also demonstrate the limitations of existing rule-based judges for grading generated PoCs, and propose a novel LLM-based judge for more precise grading. We instantiate SEC-bench Pro with 344 validated vulnerabilities across three targets, the V8 and SpiderMonkey browser engines and the Linux kernel, covering critical vulnerability families including memory-safety, sandbox, JIT, race-condition, and kernel-subsystem bugs. Across six frontier commercial and open-weight models and three coding agents, the strongest, Codex with GPT-5.5, solves 58% of instances overall. We also observe that Claude Code with Opus 4.6 tends to time out but solves most instances it completes. In contrast, open-weight models struggle; for example, GLM-5 solves only 13 of the 344 instances. During construction and evaluation, SEC-bench Pro also surfaced three vulnerabilities in V8 and SpiderMonkey, including a sandbox escape that was fixed and earned a 20,000 Google Vulnerability Reward Program bounty. More recently, SEC-bench Pro has been adopted by OpenAI to evaluate the long-horizon security capabilities of its newest models. Overall, SEC-bench Pro exposes where long-horizon vulnerability discovery succeeds, where it fails, and how different grading choices change the evaluation landscape, offering insights for security-centric model evaluation and training. Our artifact is available at https://github.com/SEC-bench/SEC-bench-Pro.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 24 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

Builds on

24 of 56 references.

References · 24

  1. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
  2. 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 156
  3. 2025Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrievalcited by 118
  4. 2023LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarkscited by 94
  5. 2024NYU CTF Bench: A Scalable Open-Source Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating LLMs in Offensive Securitycited by 90
  6. 2025CVE-Bench: A Benchmark for AI Agents' Ability to Exploit Real-World Web Application Vulnerabilitiescited by 90
  7. 2025CyberGym: Evaluating AI Agents' Real-World Cybersecurity Capabilities at Scalecited by 71
  8. 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Taskscited by 69
  9. 2026ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?cited by 47
  10. 2025BountyBench: Dollar Impact of AI Agent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systemscited by 37
  11. 2025PATCHEVAL: A New Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Patching Real-World Vulnerabilitiescited by 19
  12. 2024To Err is Machine: Vulnerability Detection Challenges LLM Reasoningcited by 17
12 more
  1. 2025From CVE Entries to Verifiable Exploits: An Automated Multi-Agent Framework for Reproducing CVEscited by 17
  2. 2025PoCGen: Generating Proof-of-Concept Exploits for Vulnerabilities in Npm Packagescited by 12
  3. 2025FaultLine: Automated Proof-of-Vulnerability Generation Using LLM Agentscited by 11
  4. 2025VulnRepairEval: An Exploit-Based Evaluation Framework for Assessing Large Language Model Vulnerability Repair Capabilitiescited by 11
  5. 2026Patch-to-PoC: A Systematic Study of Agentic LLM Systems for Linux Kernel N-Day Reproductioncited by 7
  6. 2025A Systematic Study on Generating Web Vulnerability Proof-of-Concepts Using Large Language Modelscited by 5
  7. 2026AnyPoC: Universal Proof-of-Concept Test Generation for Scalable LLM-Based Bug Detectioncited by 4
  8. 2025Automated Vulnerability Validation and Verification: A Large Language Model Approachcited by 3
  9. 2026Execution-State-Aware LLM Reasoning for Automated Proof-of-Vulnerability Generationcited by 3
  10. 2026ZeroDayBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Unseen Zero-Day Vulnerabilities for Cyberdefensecited by 3
  11. 2026A Dual-Loop Agent Framework for Automated Vulnerability Reproductioncited by 1
  12. 2026Weaver: Fuzzing JavaScript Engines at the JavaScript-WebAssembly Boundarycited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025VulInstruct: Teaching LLMs Root-Cause Reasoning for Vulnerability Detection via Security Specifications
  2. 2025SV-TrustEval-C: Evaluating Structure and Semantic Reasoning in Large Language Models for Source Code Vulnerability Analysis
  3. 2026SecCodePRM: A Process Reward Model for Code Security ↗
  4. 2026OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing
  5. 2025Benchmarking LLMs and LLM-based Agents in Practical Vulnerability Detection for Code Repositories
  6. 2026Antaeus: Hunting Repository-Level Logic Vulnerabilities via Context-Grounded LLM Reasoning ↗
  7. 2026RealSec-bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Secure Code Generation in Real-World Repositories
  8. 2026Revisiting Vul-RAG: Reproducibility and Replicability of RAG-based Vulnerability Detection with Open-Weight Models