Mar 30, 2025

Exploration Chat-Based Social Engineering

Ivan Lee, Amber Chang

With the advancement of AI Agent technologies, language models have increasingly demonstrated human-like characteristics, particularly in applications involving companionship and psychological counseling. As these models become more proficient in simulating human conversation, new social engineering attack strategies have emerged in the domain of fraud. Malicious actors can now exploit large language models (LLMs) in conjunction with publicly available user information to engage in highly personalized dialogue. Once a sufficient level of familiarity is established, these interactions may lead to phishing attempts or the extraction of sensitive personal data. This study proposes a method for investigating social engineering attacks driven by language models, referred to as ECSE (Exploring Chat-based Social Engineering). We utilize several open-source models—GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA 3.1, and DeepSeek-V3—as the foundation for this framework. Through prompt engineering techniques, we collect experimental data in a sandbox to evaluate the conversational capability and operational efficiency of these models within a static social context.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

Arrow
Arrow
Arrow

No reviews are available yet

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

Exploration Chat-Based Social Engineering

},

author={

Ivan Lee, Amber Chang

},

date={

3/30/25

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

Recent Projects

View All

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Fingerprinting All AI Cluster I/O Without Mutually Trusted Processors

We design and simulate a "border patrol" device for generating cryptographic evidence of data traffic entering and leaving an AI cluster, while eliminating the specific analog and steganographic side-channels that post-hoc verification can not close. The device eliminates the need for any mutually trusted logic, while still meeting the security needs of the prover and verifier.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.