Cybersecurity: SOC Decisions With Evidence Paths¶
Case study → cybersecurity
Incident response needs traces, not vibes.
Security operations combine messy telemetry, fast timelines, and strict playbooks. The system must connect evidence into defensible chains — and enforce what actions are allowed.
The question
Can AI support SOC triage and response while preserving chain-of-custody, enforcing playbooks, and producing incident traces that withstand review?
Failure modes to avoid
Hallucinated links
Invented relationships between events can send responders down the wrong path.
Action without authorization
Some responses must be gated by role, environment, and blast-radius constraints.
Lost provenance
If you cannot show where a claim came from, you cannot justify the response.
Non-replayable decisions
You need a trace you can replay later, not a transient chat transcript.
What changes with causal memory + playbook constraints
flowchart TB;
A["Alert"] --> E["Expand evidence graph"];
E --> P["Causal path candidates"];
P --> G["Playbook constraint gate"];
G -->|"Pass"| R["Recommended response + trace"];
G -->|"Fail"| X["Abstain + escalate"];Diagram: incident trace object (conceptual)
flowchart TB;
T["Incident trace"] --> EV["Evidence (telemetry)"];
T --> H["Hypotheses + paths"];
T --> RU["Rules applied"];
T --> AC["Actions taken / blocked"];
T --> TS["Timestamps + scope"];Outputs
Defensible hypotheses
Mechanistic chains that connect alerts to likely causes with evidence per edge.
Governed responses
Actions are constrained by playbooks, roles, environments, and blast radius.
Replayable incident traces
Postmortems become faster because the reasoning artifact is explicit.
Safer automation
Abstention is a designed outcome when evidence or authorization is insufficient.