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Gal Engelberg

Publications and source records attributed to Gal Engelberg.

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Open Security Benchmark: Towards Autonomous Enterprise Cyber Defense

Enterprises are moving toward autonomous cyber defense: agentic AI that builds situational awareness of an organization's security state and reasons from it to assessments, decisions, and actions. This rests on a holistic view of the enterprise's security state, the continuous, cross-vendor picture of identities, cloud and infrastructure, data, applications, and their configurations that security posture management assembles. As agents take on this work, what matters is not whether an agent can produce an answer but whether it should be trusted to. The field cannot yet answer this question. Real enterprise environments are private, cross-vendor, and deeply correlated, and none is exposed publicly as a shared, queryable target for evaluating such agents end to end. We call this the environment data gap. We present Open Security Benchmark (OSB), a framework that benchmarks agentic AI on this work. OSB surfaces a curated enterprise environment - a frozen, holistic view of the security state - and evaluates posture investigation across two modalities: text-to-SQL over a relational snapshot and each vendor's native API over a served instance of the same environment. Freezing the environment pins the target state as an immutable snapshot and anchors answers to a closed-form ground truth. OSB is built from five components: a data layer, a task and evaluation-set layer, a multi-dimensional scoring layer, a minimal auditable harness, and a bring-your-own path that serves public comparison and private tenant evaluation from one substrate. We instantiate the framework with two identity-security packs and a family of synthetic-organization environment datasets spanning multiple scales, and chart its extension to further posture subdomains, investigation modalities, and defense stages from assessment toward remediation.

cs.CR

Cross-Vendor Sola ISPM Benchmark: Evaluating Agentic AI for Federated Identity Security Reasoning

The rapid proliferation of multi-cloud and SaaS platforms has transformed Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) into a fundamentally cross-vendor challenge: critical misconfigurations and privilege escalation paths increasingly span multiple identity providers, infrastructure layers, and authentication systems never designed to interoperate. Existing evaluations focus on isolated single-platform environments and provide no means to assess whether an AI agent can reason across these fragmented boundaries. To address this gap, we introduce the Cross-Vendor Sola ISPM Benchmark, a production-grade benchmark of 50 data-grounded tasks requiring multi-hop entity resolution and cross-system correlation across eight integrated enterprise platforms including AWS, Okta, Azure AD, and Google Workspace. We also contribute an evaluation framework measuring not only final answer correctness but also evidentiary grounding, structural join fidelity, retrieval quality, and SQL equivalence. We evaluate the Sola AI Agent across five context configurations - from no injected metadata to full schema, graph, and retrieval context - using three frontier LLMs. Results show that structured relational context improves answer correctness by approximately 34% relatively and reduces exploration queries by approximately 70% across all tested models, with the largest gains driven by cross-vendor graph topology. Our findings indicate that frontier LLMs possess substantial latent security reasoning capability, but reliable cross-vendor identity analysis is fundamentally constrained by the availability of explicit relational context for entity resolution and evidentiary grounding. Under full context, the best configuration achieves 78% answer correctness while reducing complete failure to 4%.

cs.CR

AI Native Asset Intelligence

Modern security environments generate fragmented signals across cloud resources, identities, configurations, and third-party security tools. Although AI-native security assistants improve access to this data, they remain largely reactive: users must ask the right questions and interpret disconnected findings. This does not scale in enterprise environments, where signal importance depends on exposure, exploitability, dependencies, and business context. Repeated AI queries may therefore produce unstable prioritization without a structured basis for comparing assets. This paper introduces AI-native asset intelligence, a framework that transforms heterogeneous security data into a structured intelligence layer for consistent, contextual, and proactive asset-level reasoning. The framework combines a modeling layer, representing assets, identities, relationships, controls, attack vectors, and blast-radius patterns, with a scoring layer that converts fragmented signals into a normalized measure of asset importance. The scoring system separates intrinsic exposure, based on misconfigurations and attack-vector evidence, from contextual importance, based on anomaly, blast radius, business criticality, and data criticality. AI contextualization refines severity and business/data classifications, while deterministic aggregation preserves consistency. We evaluate the scoring system on a production snapshot with 131,625 resources across 15 vendors and 178 asset types. Sensitivity analyses and ablations show that severity mappings control finding sensitivity, AI severity adjustment refines prioritization, attack-vector scoring responds to rare exploitability evidence, and contextual modulation selectively modifies exposed resources based on business or data importance. The results support AI-native asset intelligence as a foundation for stable prioritization and proactive security-posture reasoning.

cs.CR

Sola-Visibility-ISPM: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Identity Security Posture Management Visibility

Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) is a core challenge for modern enterprises operating across cloud and SaaS environments. Answering basic ISPM visibility questions, such as understanding identity inventory and configuration hygiene, requires interpreting complex identity data, motivating growing interest in agentic AI systems. Despite this interest, there is currently no standardized way to evaluate how well such systems perform ISPM visibility tasks on real enterprise data. We introduce the Sola Visibility ISPM Benchmark, the first benchmark designed to evaluate agentic AI systems on foundational ISPM visibility tasks using a live, production-grade identity environment spanning AWS, Okta, and Google Workspace. The benchmark focuses on identity inventory and hygiene questions and is accompanied by the Sola AI Agent, a tool-using agent that translates natural-language queries into executable data exploration steps and produces verifiable, evidence-backed answers. Across 77 benchmark questions, the agent achieves strong overall performance, with an expert accuracy of 0.84 and a strict success rate of 0.77. Performance is highest on AWS hygiene tasks, where expert accuracy reaches 0.94, while results on Google Workspace and Okta hygiene tasks are more moderate, yet competitive. Overall, this work provides a practical and reproducible benchmark for evaluating agentic AI systems in identity security and establishes a foundation for future ISPM benchmarks covering more advanced identity analysis and governance tasks.

cs.CR

GenSIaC: Toward Security-Aware Infrastructure-as-Code Generation with Large Language Models

In recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has emerged as a critical approach for managing and provisioning IT infrastructure through code and automation. IaC enables organizations to create scalable and consistent environments, effectively managing servers and development settings. However, the growing complexity of cloud infrastructures has led to an increased risk of misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities in IaC scripts. To address this problem, this paper investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating security-aware IaC code, avoiding misconfigurations introduced by developers and administrators. While LLMs have made significant progress in natural language processing and code generation, their ability to generate secure IaC scripts remains unclear. This paper addresses two major problems: 1) the lack of understanding of security weaknesses in IaC scripts generated by LLMs, and 2) the absence of techniques for enhancing security in generating IaC code with LLMs. To assess the extent to which LLMs contain security knowledge, we first conduct a comprehensive evaluation of base LLMs in recognizing major IaC security weaknesses during the generation and inspection of IaC code. Then, we propose GenSIaC, an instruction fine-tuning dataset designed to improve LLMs' ability to recognize potential security weaknesses. Leveraging GenSIaC, we fine-tune LLMs and instruct models to generate security-aware IaC code. Our evaluation demonstrates that our models achieve substantially improved performance in recognizing and preventing IaC security misconfigurations, e.g., boosting the F1-score from 0.303 to 0.858. Additionally, we perform ablation studies and explore GenSIaC's generalizability to other LLMs and its cross-language capabilities.

cs.CR

An ontological lens on attack trees: Toward adequacy and interoperability

Attack Trees (AT) are a popular formalism for security analysis. They are meant to display an attacker's goal decomposed into attack steps needed to achieve it and compute certain security metrics (e.g., attack cost, probability, and damage). ATs offer three important services: (a) conceptual modeling capabilities for representing security risk management scenarios, (b) a qualitative assessment to find root causes and minimal conditions of successful attacks, and (c) quantitative analyses via security metrics computation under formal semantics, such as minimal time and cost among all attacks. Still, the AT language presents limitations due to its lack of ontological foundations, thus compromising associated services. Via an ontological analysis grounded in the Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER) -- a reference core ontology based on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) -- we investigate the ontological adequacy of AT and reveal four significant shortcomings: (1) ambiguous syntactical terms that can be interpreted in various ways; (2) ontological deficit concerning crucial domain-specific concepts; (3) lacking modeling guidance to construct ATs decomposing a goal; (4) lack of semantic interoperability, resulting in ad hoc stand-alone tools. We also discuss existing incremental solutions and how our analysis paves the way for overcoming those issues through a broader approach to risk management modeling.

cs.CR

Prompted Contextual Vectors for Spear-Phishing Detection

Spear-phishing attacks present a significant security challenge, with large language models (LLMs) escalating the threat by generating convincing emails and facilitating target reconnaissance. To address this, we propose a detection approach based on a novel document vectorization method that utilizes an ensemble of LLMs to create representation vectors. By prompting LLMs to reason and respond to human-crafted questions, we quantify the presence of common persuasion principles in the email's content, producing prompted contextual document vectors for a downstream supervised machine learning model. We evaluate our method using a unique dataset generated by a proprietary system that automates target reconnaissance and spear-phishing email creation. Our method achieves a 91\% F1 score in identifying LLM-generated spear-phishing emails, with the training set comprising only traditional phishing and benign emails. Key contributions include a novel document vectorization method utilizing LLM reasoning, a publicly available dataset of high-quality spear-phishing emails, and the demonstrated effectiveness of our method in detecting such emails. This methodology can be utilized for various document classification tasks, particularly in adversarial problem domains.

cs.LG

Towards an Ontology-Driven Approach for Process-Aware Risk Propagation

The rapid development of cyber-physical systems creates an increasing demand for a general approach to risk, especially considering how physical and digital components affect the processes of the system itself. In risk analytics and management, risk propagation is a central technique, which allows the calculation of the cascading effect of risk within a system and supports risk mitigation activities. However, one open challenge is to devise a process-aware risk propagation solution that can be used to assess the impact of risk at different levels of abstraction, accounting for actors, processes, physical-digital objects, and their interrelations. To address this challenge, we propose a process-aware risk propagation approach that builds on two main components: i. an ontology, which supports functionalities typical of Semantic Web technologies (SWT), and semantics-based intelligent systems, representing a system with processes and objects having different levels of abstraction, and ii. a method to calculate the propagation of risk within the given system. We implemented our approach in a proof-of-concept tool, which was validated and demonstrated in the cybersecurity domain.

cs.IT