Military & security

Cyber threats are rapidly increasing, expanding their impact from large-scale enterprises to government services and individual users, making robust security systems increasingly essential. However, a significant shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals exacerbates this challenge. While recent research has explored automating tasks such as penetration testing using LLM-based agents, existing frameworks often perform poorly due to limited capability in strategy formulation, domain-specific

Dependency confusion attacks exploit a structural gap in software distribution: once a package is installed, there is no cryptographic proof of which registry distributed it. Every existing defense is configuration-based and fails silently when misconfigured. We present a cryptographic distribution provenance system comprising three components: (1) cryptographic registry identity, where every registry holds an Ed25519 keypair and signs every artifact it distributes; (2) a dual-signature model, w

Climate volatility, regional production concentration, labor constraints, cyber risk, and dependence on long-distance fresh-produce supply chains expose vulnerabilities in U.S. fresh-produce and specialty-crop systems. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) can reduce some exposure by moving selected production into protected, sensor-rich environments, but recent failures in venture-backed vertical farming show that CEA cannot be treated as a universal food-security solution. This paper propos

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have driven their widespread deployment across diverse domains, even in potentially high-risk scenarios. Despite advances in safety alignment techniques, current models remain vulnerable to emerging persona-based jailbreak attacks. Existing research on persona-based jailbreak has primarily focused on attack iterations, yet it lacks systemic and mechanistic constraints on the defense side. To address this challenge, we propose Persona-Invar

Large language models (LLMs) are now being explored for defense applications that require reliable and legally compliant decision support. They also hold significant potential to enhance decision making, coordination, and operational efficiency in military contexts. These uses demand evaluation methods that reflect the doctrinal standards that guide real military operations. Existing safety benchmarks focus on general social risks and do not test whether models follow the legal and ethical rules

Safety specifications in cyber-physical systems (CPS) capture the operational conditions the system must satisfy to operate safely within its intended environment. As operating environments evolve, operational rules must be continuously refined to preserve consistency with observed system behavior during simulation-based verification and validation. Revising inconsistent rules is challenging because the changes must remain syntactically correct under a domain-specific grammar. Language-in-the-lo

Emerging AR-LLM-based Social Engineering attack (e.g., SEAR) is at the edge of posing great threats to real-world social life. In such AR-LLM-SE attack, the attacker can leverage AR (Augmented Reality) glass to capture the image and vocal information of the target, using the LLM to identify the target and generate the social profile, using the LLM agents to apply social engineering strategies for conversation suggestion to win the target trust and perform phishing afterwards. Current defensive a

Firms are deploying more capable AI systems, but organizational controls often have not kept pace. These systems can generate greater productivity gains, but high-value uses require broader authority exposure -- data access, workflow integration, and delegated authority -- when governance controls have not yet decoupled capability from authority exposure. We develop an analytical model in which a firm jointly chooses AI deployment and cybersecurity investment under this governance-capability gap

Privacy represents one of the most critical yet underaddressed barriers to AI adoption in mental healthcare -- particularly in high-sensitivity operational environments such as military, correctional, and remote healthcare settings, where the risk of patient data exposure can deter help-seeking behavior entirely. Existing AI-enabled psychiatric decision support systems predominantly rely on cloud-based inference pipelines, requiring sensitive patient data to leave the device and traverse externa

Existing AI agent safety benchmarks focus on generic criminal harm (cybercrime, harassment, weapon synthesis), leaving a systematic blind spot for a distinct and commercially consequential threat category: agents harming their own deployers. Real-world incidents illustrate the gap: Slack AI credential exfiltration (Aug 2024), Microsoft 365 Copilot calendar-injection leaks (Jan 2024), and a Meta agent unauthorized forum post exposing operational data (Mar 2026). We propose Owner-Harm, a formal th

We present enclawed, a hard-fork hardening framework built on the OpenClaw AI assistant gateway. enclawed targets deployments that need attestable peer trust, deny-by-default external connectivity, signed-module loading, and a tamper-evident audit trail -- typically regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, defense, government). The framework ships in two flavors: an open flavor preserving OpenClaw compatibility while emitting audit, classification, and data-loss-prevention (DLP) sig

While traditional AI and data-driven facilities management approaches have improved building operational efficiency, they remain constrained by centralized organizational structures that are vulnerable to cyber attacks, limited contextual understanding, and decision-making processes that exclude key stakeholders from governance. This paper introduces a novel AI- and data-driven distributed governance framework for smart building management that integrates decentralized autonomous organizations (

AI systems increasingly shape high-stakes decisions in healthcare, law, defense, and education, yet existing governance paradigms -- AI Ethics, AI Safety, and AI Alignment -- share a common limitation: they evaluate outcomes rather than verifying the reasoning process itself. This paper introduces AI Integrity, a concept defined as a state in which the Authority Stack of an AI system -- its layered hierarchy of values, epistemological standards, source preferences, and data selection criteria --

Automated insulin delivery (AID) and artificial pancreas systems increasingly serve as safety-critical cyber-physical technologies in clinical care, integrating sensors, algorithms, software, and insulin-delivery hardware to automate a life-sustaining therapy. While regulated commercial systems are supported by formal approval pathways, manufacturer governance, and post-market surveillance, clinicians are also encountering patients who rely on do-it-yourself (DIY) artificial pancreas systems tha

In November 2025, the authors ran a workshop on the topic of what makes a good reinforcement learning (RL) environment for autonomous cyber defence (ACD). This paper details the knowledge shared by participants both during the workshop and shortly afterwards by contributing herein. The workshop participants come from academia, industry, and government, and have extensive hands-on experience designing and working with RL and cyber environments. While there is now a sizeable body of literature des

Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be induced by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors are encoded as linear structure in activation space, making it tractable via activation steering, which could be used as a lightweight runtime defense. We implement three methods: Steer-With-Fixed-Coefficient (SwFC), which applies uniform additive steering, and

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables large language models (LLMs) to dynamically discover and invoke third-party tools, significantly expanding agent capabilities while introducing a distinct security landscape. Unlike prompt-only interactions, MCP exposes pre-execution artifacts, shared context, multi-turn workflows, and third-party supply chains to adversarial influence across independently operated components. While recent work has identified MCP-specific attacks and evaluated defenses, e

We prove that no continuous, utility-preserving wrapper defense-a function $D: X\to X$ that preprocesses inputs before the model sees them-can make all outputs strictly safe for a language model with connected prompt space, and we characterize exactly where every such defense must fail. We establish three results under successively stronger hypotheses: boundary fixation-the defense must leave some threshold-level inputs unchanged; an $ε$-robust constraint-under Lipschitz regularity, a positive-m

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 and now governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, has rapidly become the de facto standard for connecting large language model (LLM)-based agents to external tools and data sources, with over 97 million monthly SDK downloads and more than 177000 registered tools. However, this explosive adoption has exposed a critical gap: the absence of a unified, formal security framework capable of systematically charac

In January 2026, Anthropic published a 79-page "constitution" for its AI model Claude, the most comprehensive corporate AI governance document ever released. This Article offers the first legal and democratic-theoretic analysis of that document. Despite genuine philosophical sophistication, the constitution harbors two structural defects. First, it excludes the contexts where ethical constraints matter most: models deployed to the U.S. military operate under different rules, a gap exposed when C

Modern military operations expose soldiers to sustained psychological stress, leading to acute reactions, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and other mental health issues. Although the U.S. Department of Defense offers evidence-based therapies, access to trained professionals in forward-deployed and contested environments is limited. As a result, soldiers with early-stage distress are often evacuated to rear medical facilities, delaying care, reducing readiness, and increasing long-term risks. Thi

LLM-based chatbots in government services face critical security gaps. Multi-turn adversarial attacks achieve over 90% success against current defenses, and single-layer guardrails are bypassed with similar rates. We present CivicShield, a cross-domain defense-in-depth framework for government-facing AI chatbots. Drawing on network security, formal verification, biological immune systems, aviation safety, and zero-trust cryptography, CivicShield introduces seven defense layers: (1) zero-trust fo

Small Language Models (SLMs) are emerging as efficient and economically viable alternatives to Large Language Models (LLMs), offering competitive performance with significantly lower computational costs and latency. These advantages make SLMs suitable for resource-constrained and efficient deployment on edge devices. However, existing jailbreak defenses show limited robustness against heterogeneous attacks, largely due to an incomplete understanding of the internal representations across differe

Recent events surrounding the relationship between frontier AI suppliers and national-security customers have made a structural problem newly visible: once a privately governed model becomes embedded in military workflows, the supplier can influence not only technical performance but also the operational boundary conditions under which the system may be used. This paper argues that the central strategic issue is not merely access to capable models, but preservation of decision sovereignty: the s

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are stealthy, multi-stage attacks that require adaptive and timely defense. While deep reinforcement learning (DRL) enables autonomous cyber defense, its decisions are often opaque and difficult to trust in operational environments. This paper presents DeepXplain, an explainable DRL framework for stage-aware APT defense. Building on our prior DeepStage model, DeepXplain integrates provenance-based graph learning, temporal stage estimation, and a unified XAI pip

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental \textbf{capability-alignment paradox}: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while f

This document is a peer review by Go Kian Tik — GKT (Mbah Hogi Bejo™) of Meriel B.’s 10-day research series. Meriel B. is an AI Ethics Researcher, AI Governance Specialist, and founder of AI.MIRROR. Her research covers ten domains: the global AI governance crisis (Day 1), structural AI bias against women (Day 2), ML-based child criminality prediction (Day 3), the collapse of voluntary compliance in a military context (Day 4), LinkedIn’s algorithmic bias (Day 5), AI hallucination on non-Latin scr

This document is a peer review by Go Kian Tik — GKT (Mbah Hogi Bejo™) of Meriel B.’s 10-day research series. Meriel B. is an AI Ethics Researcher, AI Governance Specialist, and founder of AI.MIRROR. Her research covers ten domains: the global AI governance crisis (Day 1), structural AI bias against women (Day 2), ML-based child criminality prediction (Day 3), the collapse of voluntary compliance in a military context (Day 4), LinkedIn’s algorithmic bias (Day 5), AI hallucination on non-Latin scr

This paper presents DeepStage, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for adaptive and stage-aware defense against Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). The enterprise environment is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), in which host provenance and network telemetry are fused into unified provenance graphs. Building on our prior work (StageFinder), DeepStage employs a graph neural network encoder and an LSTM-based stage estimator to infer probabilistic attac

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, they remain highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks that undermine their safety alignment. Existing defense mechanisms typically rely on post hoc filtering applied only to the final output, leaving intermediate reasoning steps unmonitored and vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. To address this gap, this paper proposes a SaFer Chain-of-Thought (SFCoT) framework, which proactively evalua

The safety and reliability of vision-language models (VLMs) are a crucial part of deploying trustworthy agentic AI systems. However, VLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that undermine their safety alignment to yield harmful outputs. In this work, we extend the Randomized Embedding Smoothing and Token Aggregation (RESTA) defense to VLMs and evaluate its performance against the JailBreakV-28K benchmark of multi-modal jailbreaking attacks. We find that RESTA is effective in reducing atta

Generative AI deployment poses unprecedented challenges to content safety and privacy. However, existing defense mechanisms are often tailored to specific architectures (e.g., Diffusion Models or GANs), creating fragile "defense silos" that fail against heterogeneous generative threats. This paper identifies a fundamental optimization barrier in naive pixel-space ensemble strategies: due to divergent objective functions, pixel-level gradients from heterogeneous generators become statistically or

Embedded quantum machine learning (EQML) seeks to bring quantum machine learning (QML) capabilities to resource-constrained edge platforms such as IoT nodes, wearables, drones, and cyber-physical controllers. In 2026, EQML is technically feasible only in limited and highly experimental forms: (i) hybrid workflows where an embedded device performs sensing and classical processing while offloading a narrowly scoped quantum subroutine to a remote quantum processing unit (QPU) or nearby quantum appl

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into safety-critical workflows, yet existing security analyses remain fragmented and often isolate model behavior from the broader system context. This work introduces a goal-driven risk assessment framework for LLM-powered systems that combines system modeling with Attack-Defense Trees (ADTrees) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)-based exploitability scoring to support structured, comparable analysis. We demonstrate the framew

In decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), steganographic collusion -- where agents develop private protocols to evade monitoring -- presents a critical AI safety threat. Existing defenses, limited to behavioral or reward layers, fail to detect coordination in latent communication channels. We introduce the Dynamic Representational Circuit Breaker (DRCB), an architectural defense operating at the optimization substrate. Building on the AI Mother Tongue (AIM) framework, DRCB util

Currently, open-sourced large language models (OSLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative performance. However, as their structure and weights are made public, they are exposed to jailbreak attacks even after alignment. Existing attacks operate primarily at shallow levels, such as the prompt or embedding level, and often fail to expose vulnerabilities rooted in deeper model components, which creates a false sense of security for successful defense. In this paper, we propose \textbf{\underli

Abstract The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into cybersecurity has driven a transformational shift, significantly enhancing the ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate complex cyber threats. Traditional defense mechanisms are increasingly inadequate against sophisticated attacks, necessitating the adoption of AI-driven security solutions. This review paper presents a novel, in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art AI and ML techniques applied to intrusion

This paper provides the complete details of current challenges and solutions in the cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the context of the IIoT and its integration with edge computing (IIoT-edge computing). We systematically collected and analyzed the relevant literature from the past five years, applying a rigorous methodology to identify key sources. Our study highlights the prevalent IIoT layer attacks, common intrusion methods, and critical threats facing IIoT-edge computing

Smart manufacturing is being shaped nowadays by two different paradigms: Industry 4.0 proclaims transition to digitalization and automation of processes while emerging Industry 5.0 emphasizes human centricity. This turn can be explained by unprecedented challenges being faced recently by societies, such as, global climate change, pandemics, hybrid and conventional warfare, refugee crises. Sustainable and resilient processes require humans to get back into the loop of organizational decision-maki

The environmental crisis is increasing risks to security and peace worldwide, notably in countries that are already fragile. Indicators of insecurity such as the number of conflicts, the number of hungry people and military expenditure are rising; so are indicators of environmental decline, in climate change, biodiversity, pollution and other areas. In combination, the security and environmental crises are creating compound, cascading, emergent, systemic and existential risks. Without profound c