Eranga Bandara

Abdul Rahman, Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty

Entropy-based methods have long been used for network anomaly detection, but most existing approaches treat entropy as a scalar statistic on narrow observables rather than as part of a broader behavioral state-space for cyber systems. We propose a finite-dimensional macrostate framework for network telemetry, instantiated over the Canonical Security Telemetry Substrate (CSTS), so that coarse-graining is performed over persistent entities, typed relations, and temporal state rather than isolated event records. The resulting macrostate captures activity, distributional disorder, structural organization, temporal volatility, persistence, and deviation from benign baselines. Rather than scoring only unusual states, we model window-to-window macrostate transitions and define regime structure, stability, and anomalous change. This supports discrimination between benign workload drift and adversarial reorganization. We evaluate the framework on benchmark network telemetry datasets and compare it against Shannon-, Rényi-, and Tsallis-style entropy baselines, as well as standard anomaly detectors. The proposed representation improves anomaly discrimination and supports more interpretable behavioral analysis of cyber telemetry.

Eranga Bandara, Amin Hass, Ross Gore et al.

AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.

Eranga Bandara, Ross Gore, Ravi Mukkamala et al.

The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

Eranga Bandara, Ross Gore, Sachin Shetty et al.

Accurate assessment of neuromuscular reflexes, such as the H-reflex, plays a critical role in sports science, rehabilitation, and clinical neurology. Traditional analysis of H-reflex EMG waveforms is subject to variability and interpretation bias among clinicians and researchers, limiting reliability and standardization. To address these challenges, we propose a Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Model (VLM) Consortium and a reasoning Large-Language Model (LLM)-enabled Decision Support System for automated H-reflex waveform interpretation and diagnosis. Our approach leverages multiple VLMs, each fine-tuned on curated datasets of H-reflex EMG waveform images annotated with clinical observations, recovery timelines, and athlete metadata. These models are capable of extracting key electrophysiological features and predicting neuromuscular states, including fatigue, injury, and recovery, directly from EMG images and contextual metadata. Diagnostic outputs from the VLM consortium are aggregated using a consensus-based method and refined by a specialized reasoning LLM, which ensures robust, transparent, and explainable decision support for clinicians and sports scientists. The end-to-end platform orchestrates seamless communication between the VLM ensemble and the reasoning LLM, integrating prompt engineering strategies and automated reasoning workflows using LLM Agents. Experimental results demonstrate that this hybrid system delivers highly accurate, consistent, and interpretable H-reflex assessments, significantly advancing the automation and standardization of neuromuscular diagnostics. To our knowledge, this work represents the first integration of a fine-tuned VLM consortium with a reasoning LLM for image-based H-reflex analysis, laying the foundation for next-generation AI-assisted neuromuscular assessment and athlete monitoring platforms.