CSTS: A Canonical Security Telemetry Substrate for AI-Native Cyber Detection

Abdul Rahman

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arXiv · 2603.23459

CSTS: A Canonical Security Telemetry Substrate for AI-Native Cyber Detection

Abdul Rahman

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Abstract

Cybersecurity data remains fragmented across vendors, formats, schemas, and deployment environments, forcing AI and analytics programs to spend disproportionate effort on ingestion, normalization, and brittle source-specific engineering. This paper introduces the Canonical Security Telemetry Substrate (CSTS), a canonical, AI-ready telemetry foundation designed to harmonize heterogeneous cyber data into a common representation over persistent entities, typed relations, events, temporal state, and provenance. CSTS is intended to move cybersecurity analytics beyond ad hoc record normalization toward a reusable substrate that supports anomaly detection, graph learning, forecasting, behavior-based modeling, and agentic cyber AI. We formalize the core design principles of CSTS, define its representational components, and explain how it preserves source-specific nuance through explicit mappings and extensible metadata while still enabling portable downstream inference. We further position CSTS as a cloud-agnostic and deployment-agnostic substrate suitable for on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. The result is a unifying telemetry model that reduces the blue-collar burden of cyber data engineering and creates a clearer path to scalable, interoperable, and model-agnostic cyber AI.

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Abdul Rahman. 2026-03-24. CSTS: A Canonical Security Telemetry Substrate for AI-Native Cyber Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23459

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