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Dian Balta

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Artificial Intelligence Cryptography and Security Machine Learning Software Engineering

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preprint2026arXiv

An Ontology-Based Approach to Security Risk Identification of Container Deployments in OT Contexts

In operational technology (OT) contexts, containerised applications often require elevated privileges to access low-level network interfaces or perform administrative tasks such as application monitoring. These privileges reduce the default isolation provided by containers and introduce significant security risks. Security risk identification for OT container deployments is challenged by hybrid IT/OT architectures, fragmented stakeholder knowledge, and continuous system changes. Existing approaches lack reproducibility, interpretability across contexts, and technical integration with deployment artefacts. We propose a model-based approach, implemented as the Container Security Risk Ontology (CSRO), which integrates five key domains: adversarial behaviour, contextual assumptions, attack scenarios, risk assessment rules, and container security artefacts. Our evaluation of CSRO in a case study demonstrates that the end-to-end formalisation of risk calculation, from artefact to risk level, enables automated and reproducible risk identification. While CSRO currently focuses on technical, container-level treatment measures, its modular and flexible design provides a solid foundation for extending the approach to host-level and organisational risk factors.

preprint2026arXiv

Autonomy and Agency in Agentic AI: Architectural Tactics for Regulated Contexts

Deploying agentic AI in regulated contexts requires principled reasoning about two design dimensions: agency (what the system can do) and autonomy (how much it acts without human involvement). Though often treated independently, they are coupled: at higher autonomy, human error correction is less available, so reliable operation requires constraining agency accordingly; compliance requirements reinforce this by mandating human involvement as action consequences grow. Yet no established approach addresses them jointly, leaving practitioners without a principled basis for reasoning about oversight, action consequences, and error correction. This work introduces a two-dimensional design space in which both dimensions are organised into five operational levels, making the coupling explicit and navigable. Autonomy ranges from human-commanded operation (L1) to fully autonomous monitoring (L5); agency ranges from reasoning over supplied context (L1) to committed writes to authoritative records (L5). Building on this space, we propose six architectural tactics--checkpoints, escalation, multi-agent delegation, tool provisioning, tool fencing, and write staging--for adjusting a deployment's position within it. The tactics are grounded in two worked examples from public-sector contexts, illustrating how they apply under realistic compliance constraints. We further examine five deployment parameters--model capability, agent architecture, tool fidelity, workflow bottlenecks, and evaluation--that shape what is achievable at any configuration independently of agency and autonomy. Together, the design space, tactics, and deployment parameters provide a shared vocabulary for principled, compliance-aware agentic AI design in which responsibility, auditability, and reversibility are explicit design considerations rather than properties that must be retrofitted after deployment.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards an Accountable and Reproducible Federated Learning: A FactSheets Approach

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel paradigm for the shared training of models based on decentralized and private data. With respect to ethical guidelines, FL is promising regarding privacy, but needs to excel vis-à-vis transparency and trustworthiness. In particular, FL has to address the accountability of the parties involved and their adherence to rules, law and principles. We introduce AF^2 Framework, where we instrument FL with accountability by fusing verifiable claims with tamper-evident facts, into reproducible arguments. We build on AI FactSheets for instilling transparency and trustworthiness into the AI lifecycle and expand it to incorporate dynamic and nested facts, as well as complex model compositions in FL. Based on our approach, an auditor can validate, reproduce and certify a FL process. This can be directly applied in practice to address the challenges of AI engineering and ethics.