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Formal Policy Enforcement for Real-World Agentic Systems

9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

9 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Security policy enforcement in contemporary agentic systems predominantly consists of embedding natural-language policies within an agent's system prompt and delegating compliance to the agent's reasoning. This approach admits no formal enforcement guarantee and cannot express policies whose satisfaction depends on the causal history of an execution, a gap that becomes acute in multi-agent systems, where enforcement must reason across agents. We argue that policy enforcement in agentic systems is most naturally understood as a cross-cutting concern, and propose a framework grounded in aspect-oriented programming that specifies policies independent of the agent's reasoning and enforces them at every policy-relevant decision. Policies are written in Datalog over a set of abstract predicates describing the execution context, an observability service governed by a formal assume/guarantee contract maintains these predicates, and a reference monitor consults the policy at each action to produce an enforcement decision. When the environment contract holds, enforcement decisions coincide with the policy's intended semantics. We adopt Datalog as the policy language, a natural fit because it supports declarative rule specification, admits recursion for policies over transitive relationships, and yields deterministic enforcement. Datalog further admits tractable static analyses for contradiction, redundancy, subsumption, and conditional reachability, enabling authors to verify policy intent and surface ambiguities inherent in natural-language specifications. We realize the framework in FORGE, which enforces policies over agentic deployments without modification to the underlying agents. We evaluate FORGE on three case studies: information flow policies for prompt injection defense, approval workflows in a multi-agent pharmacovigilance system, and organizational policies for customer service.

years

2026 9

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 9

representative citing papers

An AI Agent Execution Environment to Safeguard User Data

cs.CR · 2026-04-21 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

GAAP guarantees confidentiality of private user data for AI agents by enforcing user-specified permissions deterministically through persistent information flow tracking, without trusting the agent or requiring attack-free models.

Owner-Harm: A Missing Threat Model for AI Agent Safety

cs.CR · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Owner-Harm is a new threat model with eight categories of agent behavior that harms the deployer, and existing defenses achieve only 14.8% true positive rate on injection-based owner-harm tasks versus 100% on generic criminal harm.

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Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.