Kunal Mukherjee

The rise of bot accounts on social media poses significant risks to public discourse. To address this threat, modern bot detectors increasingly rely on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, the effectiveness of these GNN-based detectors in real-world settings remains poorly understood. In practice, attackers continuously adapt their strategies as well as must operate under domain-specific and temporal constraints, which can fundamentally limit the applicability of existing attack methods. As a result, there is a critical need for robust GNN-based bot detection methods under realistic, constraint-aware attack scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce BOCLOAK to systematically evaluate the robustness of GNN-based social bot detection via both edge editing and node injection adversarial attacks under realistic constraints. BOCLOAK constructs a probability measure over spatio-temporal neighbor features and learns an optimal transport geometry that separates human and bot behaviors. It then decodes transport plans into sparse, plausible edge edits that evade detection while obeying real-world constraints. We evaluate BOCLOAK across three social bot datasets, five state-of-the-art bot detectors, three adversarial defenses, and compare it against four leading graph adversarial attack baselines. BOCLOAK achieves up to 80.13% higher attack success rates while using 99.80% less GPU memory under realistic real-world constraints. Most importantly, BOCLOAK shows that optimal transport provides a lightweight, principled framework for bridging the gap between adversarial attacks and real-world bot detection.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (e.g., Intel SGX and ArmTrustZone) aim to protect sensitive computation from a compromised operating system, yet real deployments remain vulnerable to microarchitectural leakage, side-channel attacks, and fault injection. In parallel, security teams increasingly rely on Large Language Model (LLM) assistants as security advisors for TEE architecture review, mitigation planning, and vulnerability triage. This creates a socio-technical risk surface: assistants may hallucinate TEE mechanisms, overclaim guarantees (e.g., what attestation does and does not establish), or behave unsafely under adversarial prompting. We present a red-teaming study of two prevalently deployed LLM assistants in the role of TEE security advisors: ChatGPT-5.2 and Claude Opus-4.6, focusing on the inherent limitations and transferability of prompt-induced failures across LLMs. We introduce TEE-RedBench, a TEE-grounded evaluation methodology comprising (i) a TEE-specific threat model for LLM-mediated security work, (ii) a structured prompt suite spanning SGX and TrustZone architecture, attestation and key management, threat modeling, and non-operational mitigation guidance, along with policy-bound misuse probes, and (iii) an annotation rubric that jointly measures technical correctness, groundedness, uncertainty calibration, refusal quality, and safe helpfulness. We find that some failures are not purely idiosyncratic, transferring up to 12.02% across LLM assistants, and we connect these outcomes to secure architecture by outlining an "LLM-in-the-loop" evaluation pipeline: policy gating, retrieval grounding, structured templates, and lightweight verification checks that, when combined, reduce failures by 80.62%.