Rethinking Penetration Testing for AI-Enabled Systems: From Resource Compromise to Behavioral Objective Violation

Penetration testing traditionally evaluates whether adversaries can exploit weaknesses in software, infrastructure, configurations, or operational controls to achieve security-relevant compromise. This paradigm remains necessary for AI-enabled systems, but it is no longer sufficient. In such systems, adversaries may influence prompts, retrieved content, sensor inputs, training data, memory, tools, or human-AI interaction loops to alter system behavior without directly compromising the underlying infrastructure. This paper reframes penetration testing for AI-enabled systems as objective-driven behavioral evaluation. We define an AI-enabled system as one in which learned models materially influence behavior affecting operational outcomes, and we define AI-enabled penetration as the feasible induction of AI-governed behavior that violates one or more operational objectives under an explicit threat model. This definition preserves conventional penetration testing while extending it to adversarial pathways such as prompt injection, indirect prompt injection, data poisoning, sensor manipulation, retrieval poisoning, tool misuse, and agentic misalignment. We further propose a testing workflow that identifies operational objectives, maps AI-governed behavior, analyzes adversarial influence surfaces, defines behavioral failure criteria, executes scenario-based tests, and reports evidence linking adversarial action to objective violation. A running example involving an AI-enabled security operations center assistant illustrates how penetration may occur through behavioral influence rather than infrastructure compromise. Together, the definitions, workflow, and example provide a technical framework for evaluating adversarial success in deployed AI-enabled systems.

ICBAC: an Intelligent Contract-Based Access Control framework for supply chain management by integrating blockchain and federated learning

This paper addresses the critical challenge of access control in modern supply chains, which operate across multiple independent and competing organizations. Existing access control is static and centralized, unable to adapt to insider threats or evolving contexts. Blockchain improves decentralization but lacks behavioral intelligence, while centralized machine learning for anomaly detection requires aggregating sensitive data, violating privacy. The proposed solution is ICBAC, an intelligent contract-based access control framework. It integrates permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric) with federated learning (FL). Built on Fabric, ICBAC uses a multi-channel architecture and three smart contracts for asset management, baseline access control, and dynamic revocation. To counter insider misuse, each channel deploys an AI agent that monitors activity and dynamically restricts access for anomalies. Federated learning allows these agents to collaboratively improve detection models without sharing raw data. For heterogeneous, competitive environments, ICBAC introduces a game-theoretic client selection mechanism using hedonic coalition formation. This enables supply chains to form stable, strategy-proof FL coalitions via preference-based selection without disclosing sensitive criteria. Extensive experiments on a Fabric testbed with a real-world dataset show ICBAC achieves blockchain performance comparable to static frameworks and provides effective anomaly detection under IID and non-IID data with zero raw-data sharing. ICBAC thus offers a practical, scalable solution for dynamic, privacy-preserving access control in decentralized supply chains.