Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

HKUST researchers argue that agentic vulnerability discovery forms many hypotheses but can verify only some within a fixed budget, so verification effort is something a defender can steer. Their RedHerring system inserts decoy code paths that look like real CVE-style bugs but are unreachable behind a predicate the defender can certify with private information. In 70 OSS-Fuzz instances, the authors report that five open-weight models run in Claude Code confirmed 38.7% to 60.4% fewer real crashes, with 30.6% to 51.5% of completion tokens spent on decoys.