Zer0n: An AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery and Blockchain-Backed Integrity Framework

TL;DR

Zer0n combines AI-driven vulnerability detection with blockchain-based integrity verification, enabling fast, trustworthy security automation by anchoring LLM reasoning to immutable audit trails.

Contribution

The paper introduces Zer0n, a hybrid framework that integrates LLMs with blockchain for secure, efficient vulnerability discovery and integrity assurance.

Findings

Achieves 80% detection accuracy on 500 endpoints

Maintains only 22.9% overhead in security workflows

Successfully combines high-speed detection with blockchain integrity

Abstract

As vulnerability research increasingly adopts generative AI, a critical reliance on opaque model outputs has emerged, creating a "trust gap" in security automation. We address this by introducing Zer0n, a framework that anchors the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the immutable audit trails of blockchain technology. Specifically, we integrate Gemini 2.0 Pro for logic-based vulnerability detection with the Avalanche C-Chain for tamper-evident artifact logging. Unlike fully decentralized solutions that suffer from high latency, Zer0n employs a hybrid architecture: execution remains off-chain for performance, while integrity proofs are finalized on-chain. Our evaluation on a dataset of 500 endpoints reveals that this approach achieves 80% detection accuracy with only a marginal 22.9% overhead, effectively demonstrating that decentralized integrity can coexist with high-speed security workflows.