SPLASH: Contrastive Audit Pressure for Detecting and Localizing Security Hallucinations in Generated Code

Overview & Synopsis

Code generated by large language models often passes every functional test while remaining insecure. These security hallucinations are common, written with high confidence, and repeated across samples, so neither the generator's own uncertainty nor static analyzers reliably catch them. We introduce SPLASH, which is guided by a new measure called audit pressure. It contrasts teacher-forced log-probabilities for the generated program under a security review and a style review. Aggregated to statements and programs, and grounded in a probabilistic model of competing edits, audit pressure allows SPLASH to choose the secure program among a model's candidate programs and locate the vulnerable statement, with no model training, CWE-specific rules, or internal access to the generating model. On 63,684 programs generated by 12 models for 899 tasks, SPLASH picks secure code in 74% of cases, places the vulnerable statement first in 58% of insecure programs, and chooses better than a frontier LLM judge.