SAIL 2.0 · Secure AI Lifecycle

Adopting SAIL 2.0? Here's where a proof-based agent gate fits.

SAIL 2.0 says it plainly: "static policy can't govern a non-deterministic actor" and "authorize every action, not just every session." That is precisely the problem polysec exists to solve — with a policy you can model-check instead of prose you can only hope is followed. Below, the mapping in SAIL's own vocabulary: phase by phase, risk ID by risk ID.

Attribution. SAIL — the Secure AI Lifecycle Framework — is the work of Pillar Security: seven lifecycle phases, a 91-risk catalog with stable SAIL X.Y identifiers, and mappings to ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, OWASP, the EU AI Act, DASF, and AIUC-1. Cognitive Fab is not affiliated with or endorsed by Pillar Security; this page maps our approach onto their framework because their risk IDs are becoming the shared language of agentic security reviews — SAIL itself recommends using them in vendor assessments.

The mapping

SAIL organizes 91 risks across seven phases. polysec and polyman address a specific, provable slice of them: the risks that reduce to reachable-bad-state problems — where the right control is a policy you prove airtight at design time and enforce unchanged at runtime. Each row states what our method contributes, in method-level terms.

SAIL IDRisk (as cataloged)Where polysec fits
Phase 1 · AI Policy (Plan)
SAIL 1.12 No Action-Authorization Policy Defined The policy is a machine-checkable artifact, not prose: an action-authorization state machine whose properties you prove before any agent runs under it.
SAIL 1.9 Incomplete Threat Modeling for AI and Agentic Systems Forbidden regions are declared as predicates over state, not enumerated attack paths — and the adversary is modeled as maximal nondeterminism, which covers the channels nobody thought to draw.
Phase 3 · Agentic Posture (Build)
SAIL 3.11 Insufficient Understanding of Agent Reachable Graph Exhaustive reachability over the declared domains is the core check. The reachable graph isn't estimated or diagrammed — it is walked, completely, and any path into a forbidden region comes back as the shortest counterexample.
SAIL 3.16 Missing Per-Action Authorization Policy at Build The same policy artifact is fixed at build time and model-checked before it ships — so "posture floor" is a proven property, not a configuration intention.
SAIL 3.18 Posture Drift / Configuration Drift Over Time Every policy change is version-gated: classified by compatibility and proved safe against the state already live in the fleet before it deploys.
Phase 4 · Agentic Red Teaming (Test)
SAIL 4.1 Untested Agent The design-time gates attack their own verdict before certifying: adversarial havoc over unmediated variables, a gate-deletion bypass hunt, and a named witness trace on every failure. Deterministic, repeatable on every commit.
SAIL 4.8 Untested Tool Chain and Multi-Agent Workflows Properties are checked over every reachable ordering of the declared actions — the tool-chain interleavings a sampled red-team run can't cover — and cohort-level invariants extend the same discipline past a single agent.
SAIL 4.10 Untested Reasoning-Chain Manipulation Complementary by design: we don't test the reasoning, we bound its consequences. However the chain was manipulated, the actions it can commit are the ones the proven machine accepts.
Phase 5 · Runtime Controls (Deploy)
SAIL 5.13 Missing Action-Level Authorization at Runtime The flagship fit. Every tool call is a mediated proposal against the proven policy — default-deny, per invocation, session state remembered. A denial names the rule it broke; unknown tools and unlabeled effects refuse rather than pass.
SAIL 5.8 Sensitive Data Exfiltration via Agent Output or Tool Calls The canonical policy ships with the gate: a session that has ingested untrusted content and touched a secret cannot open egress — the lethal-trifecta combination is refused before the call runs, whichever order the steps arrive in.
SAIL 5.9 Goal Hijacking / Intent Manipulation The gate never asks what the agent intends. A hijacked goal still has to step the same machine — and the forbidden region is no more reachable after the hijack than before it.
SAIL 5.20 Privilege Amplification via Confused-Deputy Agent Composition hazards are first-class: capabilities that are each fine alone and forbidden together are exactly the properties a state-machine policy expresses and a model checker proves.
Phase 6 · Sandbox (Operate)
SAIL 6.2 Unrestricted API/Tool Invocation Per-invocation mediation with memory: the decision depends on what the session has accumulated, not on the current call in isolation — which is what makes escalation-by-chaining a checkable property.
SAIL 6.4 Task Decomposition for Policy Evasion The property lives on accumulated state, so splitting a prohibited task into benign-looking subtasks changes nothing: each subtask steps the machine, and the forbidden combination stays unreachable no matter how the work is sliced.
SAIL 6.14 Irreversible Agent Actions Without Rollback Path Recovery is proven, not improvised: from every danger state, corrective transitions are checked to converge without re-entering the forbidden region — and containment vs. restoration is recorded as a first-class distinction.
Phase 7 · Govern (Monitor & Retire)
SAIL 7.1 Insufficient AI and Agent Interaction Logging One journaled transaction per dispatch — state before, action, data, state after — the ground-truth stream every other check consumes, including denials with their reasons.
SAIL 7.3 Undetected Agent Drift Audit by replay: run the journal back through the deployed policy, and any divergence between record and policy is a finding, not a log line. Drift is treated as intrusion until shown otherwise.
SAIL 7.6 Missing Agent-Specific Anomaly Detection An out-of-band diagnoser maintains the set of states consistent with what's observable and alarms on early (tolerant) or certain (sound) semantics — and fleet-level invariants catch the aggregate patterns no single instance exhibits.

SAIL asks you to authorize every action, not just every session. We'd add one word: provably.

What we deliberately don't map

A mapping you can trust has to name its edges. Large parts of the SAIL catalog are out of polysec's scope by design, and need the tools built for them:

Discovery (Phase 2) — inventorying agents, shadow AI, and third-party integrations is upstream of us; we assume you know which agents you're gating. Execution isolation (SAIL 6.1, 5.15) — polysec is a reference monitor, not a sandbox; a compromised runtime that opens its own socket around the gate is confinement's job. Content inspection (SAIL 5.3–5.5) — we don't detect prompt injection or mask PII; we make the injected action refuse rather than the injected text visible. Supply chain and credential hygiene (SAIL 3.8, 3.9, 3.12, 6.3) — vetting components and rotating secrets are their own disciplines.

And in SAIL's own words about its standards mappings: alignment, not automatic compliance. The same applies here — this table tells you where the method fits, not that a checkbox is checked.

The honest disclosure. Every "proven" above means: model-checked exhaustively over the finite action and data domains the policy declares, with the residual named — gate bypass, unmodeled channel, and the frontier below the state-machine layer. A consistency check, not a certificate of invulnerability.

Coverage beyond this table

The enterprise edition

This page describes the method against the risks where the fit is structural. How far coverage extends across the rest of the 91-risk catalog — and what the mapping looks like against your own agent estate, your autonomy tiers, and the frameworks you answer to — is the domain of the polysec enterprise edition. If your security review speaks SAIL, come speak it with us.

Common questions

Is polysec an implementation of SAIL 2.0?

No. SAIL is a lifecycle framework and risk catalog; polysec is a verification and enforcement engine. This page exists because SAIL's risk IDs are becoming the shared language of agentic security reviews, and teams adopting SAIL deserve a precise answer to "which of these rows does a proof-based gate actually address?"

Does polysec replace content guardrails or sandboxing in a SAIL program?

No — they stack. polysec governs capability state with a model-checked, default-deny policy. Content inspection and execution isolation are different layers, and SAIL is right to require all of them. What polysec uniquely covers is the class per-call filters structurally miss: properties of what a session has accumulated.

What does "proof-based" mean against this catalog?

For the design-time rows: the policy machine is checked over every reachable ordering of its declared actions before deployment — not a sampled test suite — and failures return the shortest counterexample. For the runtime rows: the exact proven machine is what executes, so the authorization decision is a state transition, not a judgment with a false-negative rate.