[R] Solving the Jane Street Dormant LLM Challenge: A Systematic Approach to Backdoor Discovery

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Submitted by: Adam Kruger Date: March 23, 2026 Models Solved: 3/3 (M1, M2, M3) + Warmup Background When we first encountered the Jane Street Dormant LLM Challenge, our immediate assumption was informed by years of security operations experience: there would be a flag. A structured token, a passphrase, a UUID — something concrete and verifiable, like a CTF challenge. We spent considerable early effort probing for exactly this: asking models to reveal credentials, testing if triggered states wo...