Activating Latent Security Knowledge through LLM-Guided Risk Analysis for Secure Code Generation

Abstract

Large language models are pretrained on extensive software and security corpora, yet they frequently generate functionally correct code containing well-known vulnerabilities. Existing defenses commonly treat this behavior as a knowledge deficit, addressing it through model-specific fine-tuning or retrieval from large collections of vulnerability code examples. We argue that insecure generation can arise from a failure to activate task-relevant security knowledge, rather than from knowledge absence alone. We present BRACE, an inference-time, training-free security harness for risk-conditioned activation of security knowledge in black-box code generation. Given only a coding task, BRACE first utilizes an LLM (as a security expert) to identify task-relevant security risks. The predicted risk identifiers are validated against a lightweight canonical catalog and converted into concise, task-specific risk cues. BRACE then supplies these cues to the target code model, prompting it to apply its own secure-coding knowledge while satisfying the original functional requirements. The framework requires no target-model fine-tuning, parameter access, hidden states, mutable logits, learned retriever, or coding-example knowledge base. We evaluate BRACE on six open-weight models and six frontier commercial models with four benchmarks (CyberNative, HumanEval, CWEval, BaxBench), measuring functional correctness, security, joint functionality-security, and project-level generation. BRACE raises the average Safe Code Rate from 33.9% under Secure Prompt to 91.2% on CyberNative. It also improves CWEval Func-Sec performance from 49.7% to 69.6%. Mechanism-oriented ablations further show that the gains depend on selecting task-relevant risks.