[ Schedule ]

One stage, two days of original research and hard-won lessons from the frontier of AI and cybersecurity. Explore featured sessions, technical talks, and field notes from the people building, breaking, and defending what comes next.

Schedule live. All times AEST. Select any session to read its abstract.

08:30–09:00RegistrationPre-Con AreaRegistration
09:00–09:10Conference OpeningMain HallOpening
09:15–10:00 Operating Modern Models SafelyPaul McMillan · OpenAI · Main Hall Featured · 45 min
Paul McMillan · OpenAI

You must budget tokens for model safety. The major model providers do it, so should you. This talk will discuss a variety of approaches, including their downsides, and give you the tools to incrementally improve your own environment.

10:00–10:30 What’s the deal with Hallucinations anyway?Ariel Herbert-Voss · RunSybil · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Ariel Herbert-Voss
Ariel Herbert-Voss · RunSybil

Abstract pending.

10:30–11:00Coffee BreakPre-Con AreaBreak
11:00–11:30 3.6 MEGAJOULES OF DANGEROUSLY SKIP PERMISSIONS: CAN Reverse Engineering in the Real WorldTristan Steele · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Tristan Steele
Tristan Steele

Letting an LLM agent loose on a live CAN bus, using a consumer portable power station as the target. The harness, permission gates, instrumentation and physical isolation it took before an agent could safely touch real hardware.

AI agents live a solitary life, spending most of their time stuck in (at best) a virtual reality. This talk follows the journey of letting them out into the real world to perform CAN bus reverse engineering. Recent LLMs have crossed the line from CAN an LLM perform this, into HOW can an LLM carry this out - and this talk explores what that shift looks like using hardware, not software. Using a consumer portable power station as a target, I'll walk through the harness, permission gates, instrumentation, feedback loops, and safety controls needed before an agent can interact with a live embedded system.

11:30–12:00 To the Frontier and Back AgainJohn McIntosh · Clearseclabs · Main Hall Research · 30 min
John McIntosh
John McIntosh · Clearseclabs

Two Windows bugs found with a frontier model, the first in just over an hour, and the human direction it took to get there. Then the same hunt replayed on open-weight local models to measure how much frontier capability survives.

At the frontier, the first legitimate 0-day finding appeared 1 hour, 16 minutes, 5 seconds after the initial request. Two Windows system-service 0-days anchor this talk: an information disclosure developed into an attacker-steerable privileged read, and a use-after-free developed through lifetime analysis, controlled reclaim, and heap grooming into write-what-where. I walk through the pattern behind both discoveries, from reconnaissance to validation, PoC, and closure. The speed is real, but it was not autonomous. The frontier model needed direction, correction, encouragement, and help with tools. It initially refused the PoC. That human work is part of the result. The talk exposes the process behind a successful bug hunt at the frontier, then comes back to test how large the gap to local models really is and what it takes to close it. I replay the hunt with the latest open-weight models, including Qwen, Gemma, GLM, and more. Same target. Same context. Same tools. Short tests isolate individual capabilities. Full runs ask whether a model can discover, validate, use the tools, reject false leads, and finish. If a local model fails, I add one measured piece of scaffolding and try again. How much frontier capability survives locally, and how much help does it need?

12:00–12:30 Confusing CNNs on NPUs with LLMs using FI; or, how much AI can we fit?Jasper van Woudenberg · Keysight Device Security Testing · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Jasper van Woudenberg
Jasper van Woudenberg · Keysight Device Security Testing

Voltage-glitching a commercial NPU to make an edge-AI camera see phantoms, or nothing at all, with LLM agents left to search the fault space overnight. Why neural accelerators are an emerging hardware attack surface.

Edge AI systems power everything from smart cameras and drones to robots and autonomous machines. These devices rely on neural processing units (NPUs) to run computer vision models (CNNs) that decide what the system "sees." But what if you could convince the hardware to see something else… or nothing at all? And what if you can have an LLM do the heavy lifting? Is there no limit to AI relevant abbreviations in a talk title?

In this talk, we show how classic hardware fault injection techniques can manipulate AI inference on real edge devices. By injecting precisely timed voltage glitches on a commercial NPU SoC, we can perturb neural network execution without modifying the model, firmware, or software stack.

Using a Rockchip RK3568 platform running YOLOv5, we demonstrate a range of effects: objects that suddenly disappear, phantom detections appearing out of nowhere, drifting bounding boxes, and the occasional confidently wrong answer. The system keeps running happily, completely unaware that its perception has been tampered with.

Exploring the enormous fault parameter space, however, is tedious for humans. So instead of turning knobs manually, we let LLM-driven agents take over. These agents analyze detection outputs, adapt glitch parameters, and autonomously search for effective fault conditions, running overnight while we sit back (or sleep).

The talk walks through the full attack workflow: observing inference execution through electromagnetic emanations, aligning glitches with neural network stages, and using autonomous agents to optimize the attack. We conclude with implications for the security of edge AI systems and why neural accelerators may represent an emerging hardware attack surface.

12:30–13:30LunchPre-Con AreaBreak
13:30–14:15 BinChomp — autonomous n-day exploit generation pipelineValentina Palmiotti · IBM X-Force · Main Hall Featured · 45 min
Valentina Palmiotti
Valentina Palmiotti · IBM X-Force

A technical look into BinChomp, an autonomous N-Day pipeline focused on the Windows Kernel.

14:15–14:45 Agents That Watch: Event-Driven Detection and Response at SlackDominic Marks · Slack · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Dominic Marks
Dominic Marks · Slack

Inside the event-driven agentic detection and response system Slack's SecOps team has run in production since April 2026, told through a no-notice red team exercise it caught, correlated and mapped end to end before an analyst was notified.

Slack's Security Operations team has built an event-driven, agentic detection and response system, in production since April 2026. An event router creates observer agents that each watch one slice of the environment (an alert rule, a repository, a service), learn what normal looks like there, and emit structured signals. Watchdog agents read across those signals, correlate what no single observer can see, and autonomously launch agentic security investigations, which are surfaced to human analysts in Slack for real-time collaboration. Every agent action is recorded in a searchable event stream, so the team can audit and analyse agent behaviour. This talk tells the story through a real, no-notice red team exercise: an adversary simulation caught, correlated, and mapped end to end before an analyst was notified. It draws out the design principle behind it: don't model the attack, model the environment, and give it a memory.

14:45–15:15 How Agentic SAST Decodes Business Context to Hunt Privilege EscalationSylvia Xu & Songjiu Liu · TikTok · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Sylvia XuSongjiu Liu
Sylvia Xu & Songjiu Liu · TikTok

Traditional Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is highly effective at identifying syntax-based vulnerabilities like SQL injection or Buffer Overflows, but completely blind to RBAC Privilege Escalation. These bugs do not violate language syntax; they violate application-specific business logic. A tool cannot detect them without deeply understanding the "business context": what roles exist, what permissions they imply, and how objects relate to their owners. This talk presents a paradigm shift in AppSec: Semantic-Grounding SAST. We introduce AuthMatrix, an agentic scanner we developed internally that extracts business context directly from source code to construct a dynamic "Knowledge Base." This knowledge base codifies complex roles, feature flags, and app specific user role boundry (e.g., ignore the difference between superadmin and admin). Guided by this context, LLM-based subagents execute semantic reasoning to hunt for authorization discrepancies with 89-94% precision. Attendees will learn how to build agentic pipelines that reconstruct business semantics, paving the way for automated logical vulnerability detection in massive, enterprise-scale web applications.

15:15–15:45Coffee BreakPre-Con AreaBreak
15:45–16:15 Harness & Hunt: A Hybrid, Role-Driven Agent Architecture for Autonomous Vulnerability ResearchAnthony Lai & Alan Ho · VXRL / Ken Wong · HKUST · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Anthony LaiAlan HoKen Wong
Anthony Lai & Alan Ho · VXRL / Ken Wong · HKUST

A three-month study adjudicating 630 agent-generated vulnerability findings against the code at the reported line. In their data, precision depended more on method than model, the more expensive frontier model did worse on static analysis, and verification is still the bottleneck.

LLM agents can already carry some vulnerability investigations from discovery to exploitation. In one of our tests, an agent decompiled a stripped binary, identified an overflow, and produced a working exploit against a live service. That result led us to a broader question: how often do agent-generated findings survive code-level verification?

Verification requires tracing attacker-controlled data to a sink, checking whether a real request can reach it, and deciding whether the weakness is exploitable. This process determines whether a client can act on the report or will lose trust in it. Today, a human still has to read the relevant code line by line. That manual review becomes the bottleneck in an automated pipeline, yet published results rarely measure it.

This session reports a three-month study of two models across multiple targets, including source code, real Java repositories, stripped ELFs, live web applications, Android APKs, and Solidity contracts. Across these targets, we collected 630 findings and adjudicated each one against the code at the reported line rather than the model's summary.

Precision depended more on method than model. Confirmation-based approaches reached 79-100%, while static analysis of real codebases reached 65-77%. On the static-analysis target, the more expensive frontier model performed worse: 285 findings with 99 false positives, compared with 169 findings and 39 false positives from the cheaper model. These results led us back to verification. A binary true-positive/false-positive verdict proved too crude, and an LLM judge drifted toward "uncertain" as the workload grew. We also document reproducible pipeline failures that looked like clean results.

16:15–16:45 Let’s Get Physical: Blind Prompt Injection and Hacking AI From MeatspaceRich Smith · Mindgard · Main Hall Research · 30 min
Rich Smith
Rich Smith · Mindgard

Prompt injection gets treated as a text problem, something that arrives over an API. But more and more of what an LLM reads into context starts in the real world: a swiped badge, a scanned barcode, an NFC tap, a Wi-Fi probe. With a Flipper Zero, a Rubber Ducky, or a $5 printed label anyone can drop an injection string into one of those channels and let it ride through the scanners, logs, and SIEMs until a downstream agent reads it and does what it says. You get nothing back when you plant it. It's blind prompt injection, and it fires later. The talk will walk the attack path, discuss some of its nuances, and finally demo and release a new open source prompt injection field kit working with Pineapple Pagers, Flipper Zeroes, and many more. Bring your devices and let's map this surface together.

16:45–17:00 AI With Receipts: Evidence-Backed AI for High-Stakes Professional WorkPete Werner · Penumbra AI · Main Hall Field Note · 15 min
Pete Werner
Pete Werner · Penumbra AI

AI can dramatically reduce the time it takes to complete a task, but verifying the result often takes just as long as doing it yourself. This talk explores how to build AI workflows where conclusions are grounded in traceable source material and reproducible analytical pipelines.

17:00–17:15 Capture the Narrative — Social Media Manipulation Wargaming for Cyberliteracy and ResearchHammond Pearce & Rahat Masood · UNSW Sydney Field Note · 15 min
Hammond PearceRahat Masood
Hammond Pearce & Rahat Masood · UNSW Sydney

Capture the Narrative is a CTF-style massively multiplayer wargame in which 288 Australian university students ran LLM-powered bot campaigns to swing a simulated election. The competition, what it taught, and the dataset it produced for future research.

LLM-powered bots are influencing social media around the world, amplifying the effects of misinformation and disinformation. Detecting if content is being promoted or manipulated by such bots is difficult, both for casual observers of social media platforms as well as for platform operators faced with continuous "cat and mouse" development by malicious adversaries. To address both challenges, we produced "Capture the Narrative", the world's first CTF-style massively-multiplayer wargame for social media manipulation. Over four weeks in 2025, 288 students formed 70+ teams from Australian universities and competed in a multiplayer competition to manipulate an in-house social media platform we called "Legit Social". They were aiming to swing a simulated election in a fictional country, a task which they ultimately completed by moving the electorate by 1.8 percentage points. In this talk I will introduce the competition, as well as discuss its outputs, which include the associated awareness campaign as well as a collaboratively developed dataset made up of survey data, developed bot software, and recorded bot activity for the thousands of bots producing millions of artificial posts to amplify in-game misinformation.

18:00–lateConference PartyPresented by Dataflow Security · Venue TBAParty