Nexus Lab at Security Bootcamp 2026 – and sharing the event report
Nexus Lab (the joint research laboratory of INT2 and VNU Information Technology Institute) attended Security Bootcamp 2026, held on 10–12 September 2026 at Hai Ba Trung Hotel, Buon Ma Thuot, Dak Lak. Organised by the Vietnam Internet Association (VIA), the thirteenth edition of the bootcamp ran under the theme Agentic Security: AI that not only assists, but actively defends and actively attacks.
The three-day programme brought together the national security community with 27 talks selected from submissions across research institutions, security vendors and enterprise teams. Nexus Lab attended as a research participant, following both tracks most relevant to our work: how AI is applied to defence, and how AI systems themselves become attack surface.
What the programme covered
Reading across the talks, four recurring threads stood out:
- AI both attacks and defends – and the asymmetry is widening. Multiple speakers showed attack costs dropping toward zero with AI assistance while defensive costs remain flat. The defensive answer proposed across talks was not more tooling but structural change: threat modelling at design time, security champions embedded in development teams, and permission models that assume AI agents will act on untrusted content.
- Prompt injection is a systems problem, not a filter problem. A recurring conclusion: filters and detectors catch known injection patterns but cannot give an architectural guarantee that untrusted data will not become instruction. Proposals ranged from separating instruction channels inside model architectures to deployment guardrails – bounded delegation, tool boundaries with two-man rules, egress checks and audit trails tied to context hashes.
- Agentic SOC operations are moving from assistance to governed autonomy. Teams running agentic triage in production reported alert triage dropping from 25–30 minutes to roughly two minutes with human-in-the-loop controls. The shared principle: autonomy expands and contracts based on evidence, not on model capability alone.
- AI-accelerated offensive research is now routine work. Teams demonstrated unauthenticated RCE chains on AI gateways and IoT firmware, BAC zero-days found by observing authorisation sinks at runtime, and supply-chain attacks that target model, skill and MCP trust boundaries. The pattern is consistent: AI compresses the labour between hypothesis and proof-of-concept, while the researcher’s judgement on scoping, target selection and verification remains the bottleneck and the safeguard.
Nexus Lab’s post-event report, shared with the community
As a research unit, Nexus Lab has prepared a summary report of the talk content, built in a source-traceable, machine-assisted way:
- The 25 publicly released slide decks were collected unchanged from the organiser’s official repository and their text extracted with machine readers (PyMuPDF, python-pptx) – no manual retyping, every figure traceable to its source slide.
- Quantitative claims, CVE identifiers and figures are reproduced as printed on the slides, with the source the slide itself cites; the report does not rank or grade talks and adds no interpretation beyond the source material.
- The talks are grouped into six themes by the speakers’ own declared topics rather than editorial judgement, with a short three-sentence summary per talk: content, problem addressed, result.
The short version of the report (v1.1, covering 26 of 27 talks – one talk on Apple Secure Kernel remains unpublished work-in-progress research) is available as a PDF:
Security Bootcamp 2026 – Báo cáo nội dung các bài trình bày (bản tóm tắt, v1.1, PDF)
The full version is available on request – please contact us. The complete slide decks belong to the organisers and speakers; please reach out to the Security Bootcamp 2026 organisers directly for access.
We thank the Vietnam Internet Association and the programme committee for the edition in Buon Ma Thuot, and the speakers for publishing their material.
Nexus Lab, the joint research laboratory of INT2 and VNU-ITI, hosted the August session of the AI Lunch & Seminar Series on Friday, 21 August 2026, at 10:00 AM, in Room 505, Building E3, VNU Hanoi (144 Xuan Thuy, Cau Giay, Ha Noi).
The session featured Prof. Nguyen Le Minh from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), who presented Speculative Decoding: Towards Efficient Inference for Large Language Models. The seminar is chaired by Dr. Nguyen Viet Cuong of Nexus Lab, INT2 & VNU-ITI.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought remarkable progress, yet their greatest obstacle today is the computational cost of sequential, token-by-token generation. The talk introduced Speculative Decoding, a breakthrough approach that accelerates LLM inference without compromising the quality of the model’s output. At its heart is the draft-and-verify mechanism: instead of decoding one token at a time, a lightweight draft model rapidly proposes candidate token sequences, which the target LLM then verifies in parallel.
The presentation included an in-depth study of UNISPEC, a self-operating speculative decoding framework that requires no retraining and provably preserves the output distribution. UNISPEC stands out with device-aware automatic tuning of the draft length, an advanced n-gram confidence estimation algorithm, and a confidence-driven tree expansion strategy. The talk closed with a discussion of the future of adaptive, hardware-aware inference and multilingual optimisation.
Prof. Nguyen Le Minh is a Professor at JAIST and head of Nguyen Lab, which focuses on Machine Learning and Natural Language Understanding. His research interests span Large Language Models, Natural Language Processing, Explainable AI (XAI), Legal AI, and methods for optimising LLM inference performance. His group has earned the SAC Highlights Award at ACL 2025 for SPECTRA and at ACL 2026 for UNISPEC, opening new directions for high-performance AI deployment.
The AI Lunch & Seminar Series is a lunchtime discussion series hosted by Nexus Lab at Building E3, Xuan Thuy Campus, Vietnam National University, Ha Noi, tracking AI developments in Viet Nam and worldwide. Sessions are deliberately brief and fast-paced, wrapping up before 2:00 PM.
Source: Nguyen Lab, JAIST
INT2 CEO Dr. Nguyen Viet Cuong, a member of the Industry Advisory Board (IAB) since 2023, participated in the IAB 2025 meeting of the Phenikaa University Faculty of Information Technology, held on January 21, 2026, in Hanoi.
The meeting brought together university leadership, faculty members, and leading experts from major IT and digital transformation companies. The board reviewed and discussed adjustments to training objectives for the 2026-2030 period to ensure alignment with the rapidly changing labour market. Programme directors also reported preliminary results from the ABET international accreditation on-site visit, providing a basis for future programme development.
Chaired by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Anh Son, IAB Chair for Computer Science, and Dr. Nguyen Kim Cuong, IAB Chair for Information Technology, members engaged in in-depth discussions on emerging technology trends and the urgent changes needed in the curriculum to ensure students are well-prepared for the AI era.
Source: Phenikaa University – IAB 2025 Meeting
INT2 has completed the renewal and restructuring of the UET-HPC system at VNU University of Engineering and Technology (VNU-UET), ensuring continued service for research and teaching while preparing for integration with a new system scheduled to be deployed in 2026.
The UET-HPC system was first integrated by HPC SYSTEMS Inc. in November 2016 and has been running continuously for nine years. Building on HPC SYSTEMS’ original deployment, INT2 carried out the renewal and restructuring of the UET-HPC system. This upgrade marks INT2’s commitment to maintaining and enhancing the high-performance computing infrastructure that serves the university’s academic community.
The renewed system continues to support research and development across multiple domains, including Big Data Analysis, Bioinformatics, Artificial Intelligence, Materials Science, IC Design, Computer-Aided Engineering, and other large-scale computational tasks essential for the university’s operations.
Looking ahead, the upgraded system is designed to integrate seamlessly with a new HPC system that will be deployed at VNU-UET in 2026, expanding the university’s computational capabilities for next-generation research and education.
Source: UET-HPC System – VNU University of Engineering and Technology
INT2 CEO Dr. Nguyen Viet Cuong was interviewed by the People’s Army Newspaper (Bao Quan Doi Nhan Dan) on opportunities for Vietnam’s semiconductor industry, published on September 24, 2023.
In the article, titled “Golden opportunity for Vietnam’s semiconductor industry”, Dr. Cuong discussed three key points:
First, Vietnam should not miss the opportunity to attract retiring semiconductor scientists from around the world. He drew a parallel with South Korea, whose semiconductor industry was originally built by retired Japanese experts. “The advantage is that wherever these scientists go, the companies they previously worked for tend to follow,” he noted. He urged the government and universities to create mechanisms to attract these experts, particularly those of Vietnamese origin.
Second, Dr. Cuong cited estimates available at the time that placed Viet Nam among the countries with the world’s largest rare-earth reserves, after China. He recommended using this as leverage in negotiations with partners requiring these raw materials, by requiring them to build manufacturing facilities in Vietnam as a condition for access. This would create opportunities for training and technology transfer.
Third, drawing from INT2’s own experience in supercomputing, Dr. Cuong illustrated the challenges of technology dependency: while computing hardware can be purchased readily, specialised interconnect equipment must be imported from a limited number of foreign suppliers with lead times of approximately one year.
He also cited China’s example of requiring foreign equipment suppliers to provide source code for security purposes, which he noted enabled the creation of Ruijie Networks, described in the interview as now among the world’s top four network equipment manufacturers.
The article was originally published by the People’s Army Newspaper (qdnd.vn) and syndicated by Lang Son Newspaper.