Research

Methodology, in the open.

The point of a lab is the framework, not the demo. These are the foundations MASec Lab builds tooling on — open enough to be used, cited, and challenged.


ABFP active research

Agent Behavioural Fingerprinting

Agents are non-deterministic, so signature-based checks miss them. ABFP profiles an agent by the shape of its behaviour — tool-call sequences, reasoning patterns, timing — and builds a baseline. Hijacked, impersonated, or drifting agents then show up as deviations from that baseline rather than as known-bad payloads.

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HCAP open spec draft

Hierarchical Capability & Attestation Protocol

When agent A delegates to agent B, what is B actually allowed to do, and who said so? HCAP makes capability and its provenance explicit and verifiable down a delegation chain, so over-privilege and confused-deputy attacks are detectable rather than implicit.

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ASI01–ASI10 detection suite

OWASP Agentic Top 10 coverage

Detection mapped to the agentic threat classes — memory poisoning, tool misuse, privilege compromise, intent breaking, cascading hallucination, and the rest — so an assessment produces findings against a shared, recognised taxonomy instead of ad-hoc notes.

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A2A applied analysis

Signed, Not Safe — A2A v1.0 signed Agent Cards

A2A v1.0 shipped cryptographically signed Agent Cards — closing card spoofing and in-transit tampering. But a legitimately signed card with adversarial description fields is still a working prompt-injection vector at the agent-selection layer. Signature verification and content trust are two separate gates; this piece shows why, and where ABFP-style behavioural baselining closes the second.

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mst — agentic top 10 scan
 $ mst scan a2a://target.local --suite asi
[ASI06] memory & context ......... 0 findings
[ASI02] tool misuse .............. 2 findings [ASI03] privilege abuse .......... 1 finding report → out/target.sarif