Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2611.01127

What Must Be Done Here? Using a Bounded Application-Security Ontology at the Point of Change

Pedro Farinha
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The security guidance that bears on code is real but scattered. It lives across secure-development frameworks, verification standards, controls catalogues, threat taxonomies, and, increasingly, normative regimes such as the EU's NIS2 -- and most of it is written for readers other than the engineer, or the AI assistant, at a point of change. Existing cybersecurity ontologies largely model attacks, indicators, and risk for detection and analysis, not the engineering-practice substance one must act on. This paper presents a use case for an existing bounded application-security ontology, AppSec Core, whose construction and validation are reported separately. We show how it is used. It makes the engineering-actionable fraction of those authorities addressable as a typed working set: the control objectives that apply, the practices that realize them, the mechanisms that implement them, and the evidence artifacts they expect, each traceable to the sources that justify it. We reach that working set from two entry points that recur in practice. Forward, from a code change: a change to authentication middleware scopes to its governing domain slice and returns the obligations the change must satisfy. Inverse, from a normative obligation: "make this NIS2-compliant" resolves a generic legal duty into the concrete engineering obligations it implies across slices, surfacing precisely the fraction of a mostly-governance regulation that lands in code. The same working set is what a human engineer reads and what an LLM-grounded assistant is handed as grounding. The use turns "read every applicable authority" into "satisfy this typed working set", for a code change or a compliance duty alike. The contribution is the demonstrated use; the artefact, its validation, and its governance are companion work.

Explore related subjects

cs.CRcs.SE

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Pedro Farinha. 2026-10-31. What Must Be Done Here? Using a Bounded Application-Security Ontology at the Point of Change. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01127

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A Survey on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Towards Practical Deployments: Security and Privacy Perspectives

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a transformative technology capable of reshaping wireless environments through dynamic manipulation of electromagnetic waves. Although RISs have been widely studied for communication, sensing, and localization, their security and privacy implications are still fragmented across application-specific studies, prototypes, and testbeds. This survey provides a deployment-oriented review of RIS applications, with a focus on the security and privacy threats, vulnerabilities, and defensive strategies relevant to practical use. We analyze scenarios with two types of systems (with and without legitimate RIS) and two types of attackers (with and without malicious RIS), and clarify how RIS introduces new attack surfaces to practical systems, including eavesdropping, jamming, and spoofing attacks. In response, we review defenses against RIS-related attacks in these systems, such as protocol- and algorithm-level protections, unauthorized RIS detection, and interference/disruption-based mitigation. We also discuss scenarios in which the legitimate user applies an additional RIS to defend against attacks. To support future research, we also curate papers and available open resources at https://awesome-ris-security.github.io/. By highlighting RIS's functionality and its security/privacy challenges and opportunities, this survey aims to guide researchers and engineers toward the development of secure, resilient, and privacy-preserving RIS-enabled practical wireless systems and environments.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Jaguar: Fast Private Neural Network Inference with Power-of-Two Homomorphic Arithmetic

Hybrid HE/2PC private neural network inference remains bottlenecked by prime-modulus homomorphic arithmetic in convolution and by a precision flow that runs ReLU at doubled bitwidth before invoking a separate truncation protocol. We present Jaguar, a system built on a single design choice--a power-of-two ciphertext ring--that addresses both. The choice enables SPA-Conv, a coefficient-domain convolution kernel that replaces NTT-centric polynomial multiplication with Scalar-Polynomial Accumulation, and an exact ciphertext-side truncation by local right shifts that lets ReLU run directly at the target fixed-point precision and eliminates the post-ReLU truncation protocol. Where NTT remains genuinely useful--at the client, for the single polynomial multiplication during decryption--we recover it through an auxiliary NTT prime, preserving the power-of-two protocol substrate while keeping decryption O(N log N). On ImageNet-scale ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2 with AVX disabled, Jaguar achieves 2.07-3.72x lower end-to-end latency than Cheetah and 2.16-3.36x lower than Rhombus, with 1.16-1.76x lower communication than Cheetah.

cs.CR↗