AI Sandboxes: A Threat Model, Taxonomy, and Measurement Framework

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 16 Jun 2026] AI Sandboxes: A Threat Model, Taxonomy, and Measurement Framework Inderjeet Singh, Haitham Mahmoud, Andrés Murillo AI systems are increasingly evaluated in bounded environments that combine isolation, simulation, instrumentation, supervision, and evidence capture. For physical AI, AIoT, and cyber-physical systems, this shift is not a matter of terminology: the system under test may sense, decide, actuate, communicate, and fail through physical processes, networked devices, and human operators. This article develops an assurance-oriented account of AI sandboxes as controlled environments for testing, evaluation, verification, and validation across digital AI, embodied autonomy, and cyber-physical deployments. We formalize the sandbox boundary and a weakest-link rule for composing per-dimension evidence into a bounded deployment claim; separate major sandbox archetypes; define a cyber-physical threat model that includes attacks on the assurance apparatus itself; and introduce a measurement framework spanning fidelity, controllability, observability, containment, reproducibility, and governance artifacts, instantiated on three worked case studies of real sandboxes. The resulting threat model, taxonomy, and measurement framework clarify what a sandbox can validly test, which risks it can contain, and what forms of evidence it can support for safety, security, and regulatory assurance. Comments: 50 pages, 8 figures, 10 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2606.18532 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.18532v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18532 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Inderjeet Singh [view email] [v1] Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:57:24 UTC (1,985 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.RO cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)