Papers for

security compliance teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

AI agent runs recorded in sealed, replayable, auditable evidence files

NovaFabric: A Black-Box Recorder for AI Agents with Sealed, Replayable, Diffable and Auditable Runs

Abstract: An AI agent run is no longer a function call. It is a cascade of prompts, model calls, tool invocations, file and network effects and sub-agents. When such a run misbehaves, or an auditor asks what happened, logs and traces answer poorly: they are mutable, partial and cannot be re-executed. This technical report describes NovaFabric, an open-source (Apache-2.0) black-box recorder for AI agents that turns a run into a sealed, replayable, diffable and auditable evidence capsule. The design rests on two formats only. The Run Capsule is a directory of flat files and the source of truth; every database is a rebuildable index over capsules. The Evidence Bundle is the signed export for an auditor. Everything else follows existing standards: OpenTelemetry GenAI, OpenLineage, W3C PROV, in-toto/DSSE, RFC 3161 and CycloneDX. A single-node run is the smallest case of a distributed one; the schema supports a capsule hierarchy for Slurm arrays and Kubernetes jobs, though automatic parent finalization is library-only today. The report covers the architecture and the engines behind the verb chain capture, seal, replay, diff and audit: fail-closed mocked replay; a diff gate with a stable exit-code contract; DSSE signatures that bind their intent and a capsule root that commits to file names; a capsule treated as untrusted input; signer identity-trust levels with offline TSA and CRL checking; maker-checker promotion against an operator-held trust list; and a deny-by-default authorization table for every dashboard route. It presents no new experiments; the evaluation is in arXiv:2609.12582. Every count except the private ADR tally is generated by a probe script run on the public source at the v0.107.0 tag (150 top-level commands, 84 Python subpackages, 16,721 test functions), every capability carries an explicit maturity label, and honest-limits boxes state where the system stops.

Sun 25 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingCryptography and SecuritySoftware Engineering
The gist
AI agents do many things during a run, like making calls and using tools, and tracking what happens is complicated. Existing logs are incomplete and can be changed, so they don't reliably show what happened. The authors created NovaFabric, a tool that captures AI runs as fixed, replayable files that can be checked and compared later. This makes investigating or auditing AI behavior easier and more trustworthy.
Open → 2610.34594v1

Security metrics method aids automatic compliance with standards

Developing Security Metrics for Automated Compliance Checking

Abstract: To automatically check for compliance with security-related standards, prose requirements must be translated to technical properties to make them measurable. A multitude of metrics have been proposed in past literature, but they are lacking a systematic methodology for their elicitation. Without such a methodology, metrics remain inconsistent in their data models and abstraction levels, they exhibit considerable overlaps and are difficult to combine to comprehensively cover a standard's requirement. In this paper, we develop a data model for security metrics based on a systematization of compliance requirements, and we propose a methodology for their elicitation. The method is based on an ontology that enables a systematic development of metrics with a comparable degree of abstraction. We also present our initial work on an open-source effort that demonstrates that our approach also supports a collaborative development of metrics.

Fri 23 OctCryptography and Security
The gist
Checking if computer systems follow security rules can be hard because the rules are written in plain language and not directly measurable. The authors created a way to turn these rules into clear, measurable security metrics using a structured data model and an ontology. This helps make sure the metrics are consistent and can work together to cover all parts of a standard. They also started an open-source project to let people work together on creating these metrics.
Open → 2610.32690v1

AspisAI enables automated and traceable multi-standard compliance monitoring

AspisAI: A Canonical, Machine-Interpretable Governance Framework for Automated Multi-Standard Compliance Monitoring

Abstract: Organisations operating in regulated and critical-infrastructure sectors must satisfy multiple, heterogeneous cybersecurity and privacy instruments simultaneously, including but not limited to ISO/IEC~27001, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework~2.0, Cyber Essentials, and the GDPR. In practice, these obligations are managed through manual mappings, spreadsheet-based tracking, and periodic audits that are costly to maintain, inconsistent across standards, and weak in traceability. This paper presents \emph{AspisAI}, a bounded, standard-agnostic governance framework that translates selected requirements from several frameworks into a canonical, machine-interpretable control model, and evaluates submitted evidence against condition-based decision rules to produce explainable, traceable compliance determinations. Within a bounded scope of 26 representative requirements, the framework is evaluated in a controlled simulation against five governance-oriented criteria and, critically, against two external reference points that mitigate the circularity of single-author evaluation: its cross-standard mappings are validated against NIST's own published informative references, with 57\,\% exact agreement and divergences confined to same-family controls, and the framework is applied to real third-party evidence from the OpenSSF Scorecard, surfacing genuine governance gaps in a live open-source project. The controlled results, comprising full requirement encoding, 88.5\,\% mapping coverage, complete traceability, and correct detection of all introduced gaps, establish functional correctness, while the external validation provides evidence of applicability beyond the simulation. The contribution is therefore a demonstration that a canonical, provenance-preserving governance model can render multi-standard compliance both automatable and auditable.

Wed 9 SeptCryptography and SecurityComputers and SocietySoftware Engineering
The gist
Companies must follow many different security and privacy rules at the same time, which is usually hard and done by hand. The authors created AspisAI, a system that turns these various rules into one common model a computer can understand. It checks submitted evidence automatically and explains whether rules are met, making compliance easier to track and audit. They tested AspisAI on real and simulated data, showing it works well and matches other trusted mappings.
Open → 2609.10881v1