Measuring and Exploiting Contextual Bias in LLM-Assisted Security Code Review

arXiv:2603.18740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Automated Code Review (ACR) systems integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in software development workflows, ranging from interactive assistants to autonomous agents in CI/CD pipelines. In this paper, we study how LLM-based vulnerability detection in ACR is affected by the framing effect: the tendency to let the presentation of information override its semantic content in forming judgments. We examine whether adversaries can exploit this through contextual-bias injection: crafting PR metadata to bias ACR security judgments as a supply-chain attack vector against real-world ACR pipelines.
To this end, we first conduct a large-scale exploratory study across 6 LLMs under five framing conditions, establishing the framing effect as a systematic and widespread phenomenon in LLM-based vulnerability detection, with bug-free framing producing the strongest effect. We then design a realistic and controlled experimental environment, evaluating 17 CVEs across 10 real-world projects, to assess the susceptibility of real-world ACR pipelines to vulnerability reintroduction attacks. We employ two attack strategies: a template-based attack inspired by prior related work, and a novel LLM-assisted iterative refinement attack.
We find that template-based attacks are ineffective and may even backfire, as direct biasing attempts raise suspicions. Our iterative refinement attack, on the other hand, achieves 100% success, exploiting a fundamental asymmetry: attackers can iteratively refine attacks against a local clone of the review pipeline, while defenders have only one chance to detect them. Debiasing via metadata redaction and explicit instructions restores detection in all affected cases. Overall, our findings highlight the dangers of over-relying on ACR and stress the importance of human oversight and contributor trust in the development process.