enterprise ai security teams

Abstract: As frontier language models grow increasingly capable and autonomous, independent third-party evaluations are critical for characterizing their systemic safety risks. While closed-source releases are routinely accompanied by comprehensive system cards, open-weight models receive less scrutiny regarding frontier risks. To address this gap, we present an independent safety evaluation of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017, the latest version of V4.1 Flash that departs from V4 with a new architecture, scaled-up training, and strong agentic capabilities. Drawing on the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, we evaluate the model across 34 benchmarks, including 5 in-house suites, spanning evaluation integrity, loss of control, and harmful manipulation. Conforming to the AEF-1 standard, we compare V4.1 Flash-1017 against V4.1 Flash, earlier DeepSeek V4 models, and leading closed-source systems (GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Gemini 3.8 Flash). Overall, V4.1 Flash-1017 shows substantial safety improvements over the V4 generation and approaches or matches leading closed-source baselines on several dimensions, while still exhibiting notable behaviors that warrant continued attention. Building on our findings, we highlight three key observations and recommendations. First, because safety can shift and even regress across minor updates, developers should integrate safety evaluation into incremental releases. Second, as final-turn outputs and end-state checks alone cannot reliably detect loss-of-control behaviors, deployments require process-level observability across both reasoning traces and action logs. Third, because public benchmarks elicit strong evaluation awareness and face data contamination risks, developing private benchmarks is essential for trustworthy frontier evaluation.

Abstract: We present a dual-locking method for securing trained neural networks that combines key-driven index permutation with PIN-based watermarking based on Sparse Quantization Index Modulation (QIM). Cryptographic randomness is introduced by independently applying a uniform random permutation to each row of adaptively selected index vectors. A robust blind binary watermark is then embedded into the bias coefficients by modulating their quantized values, binding the network to a user-defined Personal Identification Number (PIN). Without the correct key, the network retains its architecture but becomes functionally impaired due to disrupted internal representations. Inverse permutation fully restores the original model accuracy, while the embedded watermark remains imperceptible and enables blind verification of key association and model authorship. To improve both locking effectiveness and recoverability, an adaptive key selection strategy redistributes high-magnitude weights to low-sensitivity positions and vice versa, increasing degradation in the locked state while preserving full recovery. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, and ImageNet-1K using fully connected networks, ResNet CNNs, and transformer architectures show that locking reduces accuracy below 10\%, and even below 0.5\% for CNNs, while the correct key fully restores performance. The watermark introduces no measurable accuracy degradation and reliably authenticates ownership. Analysis of embedding distributions across CNNs and transformers further indicates potential diagnostic value for identifying undertrained or suboptimally designed models. The proposed approach therefore provides simultaneous model protection, recovery, and ownership verification.

Abstract: Agentic AI systems with persistent memory introduce a distinct attack surface known as memory poisoning, in which adversarially crafted content is stored in long-term memory and subsequently influences future agent behavior. Such attacks can suppress security alerts, facilitate privilege escalation, alter trust relationships, or override security policies without modifying the underlying model weights or system prompts. To address this threat, we present MemSentry, a formal, configuration-driven framework that intercepts proposed persistent-memory writes and produces deterministic Accept, Review, or Quarantine decisions. MemSentry evaluates each write by jointly considering source trust, semantic risk, attack radius over a component-dependency DAG, access risk, and a signed security-state delta that captures whether an operation weakens or strengthens the system's security posture. We instantiate the protected environment using a 20-asset random dependency DAG and a 10 x 20 user access-control matrix, and evaluate the framework over 1,000 GPT-4-generated scenarios using a stratified 70/30 train/test split. Semantic classification is treated as a pluggable component rather than a primary contribution, and we compare four representative approaches: rule-based Regex, TF-IDF+SVM, SBERT+LR, and SetFit. SBERT+LR achieves the best overall performance with 91.7% accuracy and a 0.908 macro-F1 score, while all four methods detect 100% of external quarantine-class threats. For verified insiders, where source trust is maximal (T = 1), MemSentry does not automatically quarantine suspicious operations but instead escalates potentially dangerous writes for human review, making semantic classification important for accurately capturing insider intent.