Apr 26, 2026
BSSBreach: Testing designer protein sequences for biosecurity evasion capabilities
Adam Streck, Daniel Cermann, Jan Berndt
The decreasing cost of DNA synthesis and advances in generative protein design raise concerns about evading biosecurity screening systems. We present BSS-Breach, a benchmarking framework for testing screening tools against both conventional sequence modifications and AI-generated variants. Using a pipeline of transformations, including synonymous substitutions, padding, splitting, and diffusion-based sequence generation, we conduct a penetration test against a biosecurity check tool ComMec.
Our results show that while standard manipulations are reliably detected, all synthetic variants generated via diffusion models bypass screening. This exposes a key limitation of current approaches, which rely primarily on sequence similarity.
These findings highlight the need for next-generation screening methods, as well as benchmarking and pen-testing toolkits to evaluate these.
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Cite this work
@misc {
title={
(HckPrj) BSSBreach: Testing designer protein sequences for biosecurity evasion capabilities
},
author={
Adam Streck, Daniel Cermann, Jan Berndt
},
date={
4/26/26
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}


