LLM Vulnerability Persistence
Abstract
Large language models are increasingly deployed as core engines for automated code generation, accelerating software development while also emitting insecure programs. Existing defenses rely mainly on post-hoc scanning and treat each sample in isolation, leaving open a more predictive question: are these failures recurring enough that hidden vulnerabilities can be inferred from a models visible outputs alone? We study this threat model, which we call vulnerability persistence , and introduce the Feature-Security Table (FSTab), a model-specific mapping from observable frontend features to recurrent backend vulnerabilities constructed from generated applications labeled with static-analysis findings. FSTab is queried using only public UI actions and endpoints, without source-code access, and across six code LLMs and five WebGenBench categories it achieves perfect attack success and coverage in multiple held-out categories while remaining strong under cross-category transfer, reaching up to 85.67% average attack success and 84.97% average coverage when the target category is excluded during construction. We further introduce a model-centric recurrence suite over features, prompt rephrasings, and application categories, and find that cross-category transfer exceeds within-category recurrence, suggesting that many insecure implementations reflect stable model-level coding habits rather than isolated prompt artifacts. These results expose a predictive black-box attack surface in LLM-generated software, motivate evaluation of recurring model behaviors, and our code is available at .