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.
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.
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.