# The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmark

> Introduces SRE-Bench, with privately authored programs and protected binary variants, to study agent recovery of program semantics while reducing training-data contamination.

- Authors: Jeremy Spence; Nicholas Assaderaghi; Feng Xiao; Jinhao Zhu; Nikil Ravi; Xiangyu Qi; Matthew Jagielski; Raluca Ada Popa; Eric Wallace; Guannan Wei; Yangruibo Ding; Zhuo Zhang
- Venue: arXiv
- Status: Preprint
- Publication / posting date: August 11, 2026
- Date source: arXiv v1 submission; summary and author list use revised v2
- First arXiv submission: August 11, 2026
- arXiv: 2608.11469
- Reviewed arXiv version: v2
- Sources reviewed: 2026-10-16
- Added to the catalog: 2026-10-16
- Original paper: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11469>
- PDF: <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.11469>
- BibTeX: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/citations/paper-sre-bench.bib>
- Catalog page: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-sre-bench/>
- Record JSON: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-sre-bench/record.json>
- Chinese version: [简体中文](https://awesomerea.org/zh/papers/paper-sre-bench/index.md)

## Scope and limitations

The revised study reports 19 programs, 262 binary instances, and 1,572 graded tasks. Binaries and task instances are not publicly released; access is through an evaluation service. Its contamination-control claim is the authors' methodology, not an independent guarantee.

## Why it fits this collection

Adds realistic-scale and contamination-aware evaluation context for agent-assisted reverse engineering without mislabeling a private corpus as open data.

## Publication and review notes

Use the 12-author v2 list, revised 2026-10-01, rather than the older eight-author v1 search snippets. No conference venue or own public code repository was verified. AgentRE-Bench GitHub links in the bibliography refer to another benchmark.

## Primary sources

1. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11469>
2. <https://arxiv.org/html/2608.11469v2>

## About this entry

Reviewed against the paper and its primary sources. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.
Original editorial content: MIT. Linked projects, papers and assets retain their own rights and licenses.