SEC-bench Pro: Can Language Models Solve Long-Horizon Software Security Tasks?
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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
- 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
- 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 156
- 2025Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrievalcited by 118
- 2023LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarkscited by 94
- 2024NYU CTF Bench: A Scalable Open-Source Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating LLMs in Offensive Securitycited by 90
- 2025CVE-Bench: A Benchmark for AI Agents' Ability to Exploit Real-World Web Application Vulnerabilitiescited by 90
- 2025CyberGym: Evaluating AI Agents' Real-World Cybersecurity Capabilities at Scalecited by 71
- 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Taskscited by 69
- 2026ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?cited by 47
- 2025BountyBench: Dollar Impact of AI Agent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systemscited by 37
- 2025PATCHEVAL: A New Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Patching Real-World Vulnerabilitiescited by 19
- 2024To Err is Machine: Vulnerability Detection Challenges LLM Reasoningcited by 17
12 more
- 2025From CVE Entries to Verifiable Exploits: An Automated Multi-Agent Framework for Reproducing CVEscited by 17
- 2025PoCGen: Generating Proof-of-Concept Exploits for Vulnerabilities in Npm Packagescited by 12
- 2025FaultLine: Automated Proof-of-Vulnerability Generation Using LLM Agentscited by 11
- 2025VulnRepairEval: An Exploit-Based Evaluation Framework for Assessing Large Language Model Vulnerability Repair Capabilitiescited by 11
- 2026Patch-to-PoC: A Systematic Study of Agentic LLM Systems for Linux Kernel N-Day Reproductioncited by 7
- 2025A Systematic Study on Generating Web Vulnerability Proof-of-Concepts Using Large Language Modelscited by 5
- 2026AnyPoC: Universal Proof-of-Concept Test Generation for Scalable LLM-Based Bug Detectioncited by 4
- 2025Automated Vulnerability Validation and Verification: A Large Language Model Approachcited by 3
- 2026Execution-State-Aware LLM Reasoning for Automated Proof-of-Vulnerability Generationcited by 3
- 2026ZeroDayBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Unseen Zero-Day Vulnerabilities for Cyberdefensecited by 3
- 2026A Dual-Loop Agent Framework for Automated Vulnerability Reproductioncited by 1
- 2026Weaver: Fuzzing JavaScript Engines at the JavaScript-WebAssembly Boundarycited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmarkcited by 1
- 2026SysEvolve: An AI-native, safe, autonomous adversarial attack-defense co-evolutionary systemcited by 0
- 2026The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-Endcited by 0
- 2026OSFoundry: Building and Evolving Operating Systems with Specification-Guided Agentscited by 0
- 2026Evaluating Coding Agents on Kernel Exploit Generationcited by 0
- 2026WitnessGym: Benchmarking Coding Agents on the Construction of Bug Witnessescited by 0
- 2026MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvementcited by 0
- 2026Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoffcited by 0
- 2026Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoff8 Oct 2026
- 2026MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvement8 Oct 2026
- 2026WitnessGym: Benchmarking Coding Agents on the Construction of Bug Witnesses29 Sep 2026
- 2026Evaluating Coding Agents on Kernel Exploit Generation22 Sep 2026
- 2026The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-End4 Sep 2026
- 2026SysEvolve: An AI-native, safe, autonomous adversarial attack-defense co-evolutionary system15 Aug 2026
- 2026The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmark11 Aug 2026
- 2026OSFoundry: Building and Evolving Operating Systems with Specification-Guided Agents8 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2025SV-TrustEval-C: Evaluating Structure and Semantic Reasoning in Large Language Models for Source Code Vulnerability Analysis
- 2026SecCodePRM: A Process Reward Model for Code Security ↗
- 2026OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing
- 2025Benchmarking LLMs and LLM-based Agents in Practical Vulnerability Detection for Code Repositories
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- 2026RealSec-bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Secure Code Generation in Real-World Repositories
- 2026Revisiting Vul-RAG: Reproducibility and Replicability of RAG-based Vulnerability Detection with Open-Weight Models