RuntimeGuard-AI

RuntimeGuard-AI is the official reference implementation for the research paper:

"RuntimeGuard-AI: Scalable Tamper-Evident Accountability for High-Risk AI Systems Under the EU AI Act" Submitted to USENIX Security 2026

Author: Neeraj Kumar Singh Beshane

Repository: https://github.com/neerazz/RuntimeGuard-AI

This repository provides the cryptographic attestation architecture described in the paper, designed to meet Article 14 (Human Oversight) requirements without compromising inference latency.

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📄 Research Paper

The full manuscript and supplementary materials are available in the paper/ directory:

• RuntimeGuard_AI_Submission_Ready.md: The complete research paper (Markdown, submission-ready).
• research.md: State-of-the-art analysis and novelty audit.
• figures/: All evaluation plots and architecture diagrams.

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🏗️ Repository Structure

This project is strictly scoped to the artifacts described in the paper.

runtimeguard-ai/
├── src/
│   ├── inline/           # [Rust] Inline Policy Engine (Paper §5.2)
│   │   └── src/
│   │       ├── engine.rs # Theorem 1 (Latency Separation) via try_send + tokio::spawn
│   │       └── types.rs  # ComplianceRecord, PolicyResult
│   │
│   └── attestor/         # [Rust] ZK Attestation Service (Paper §5.3)
│       └── src/
│           ├── circuit.rs    # ComplianceCircuit (Groth16)
│           ├── merkle.rs     # Merkle Tree for Inclusion Proofs (Appendix B.2)
│           └── bin/
│               └── bench_prove.rs  # Benchmarking harness
│
├── paper/                # Research manuscript and figures
├── Cargo.toml            # Workspace definition
└── LICENSE               # MIT License

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🚀 Key Claims Validation

1. Latency Separation (Theorem 1)

The Inline Policy Engine (src/inline) demonstrates how policy enforcement is decoupled from logging I/O.

• Code: src/inline/src/engine.rs (lines 84-112)
• Mechanism: Uses tokio::spawn to offload full-queue events to a disk buffer, ensuring the critical inference path never blocks.

2. ZK Attestation Performance (Table 6)

The Attestor (src/attestor) provides the benchmark harness to reproduce the paper's performance claims.

• Claim: ~62ms Witness Generation, ~1.4s Total Proving (50k constraints).
• Run Benchmark:

  cd src/attestor
  cargo run --release --bin bench_prove -- --constraints 50000 --samples 10

3. Merkle Inclusion Proofs (Appendix B.2)

The Merkle Tree implementation (src/attestor/src/merkle.rs) provides:

• MerkleTree::from_data() - Construct tree from compliance records.
• generate_proof() - Generate O(log n) inclusion proof.
• verify_proof() - Verify a record's existence.

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🛠️ Quickstart

Prerequisites

• Rust: Latest stable (rustup update)

Run Tests

# Verify Inline Engine Logic
cd src/inline
cargo test

# Verify Cryptographic Components (Merkle + ZK)
cd ../attestor
cargo test
cargo run --release --bin bench_prove

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📜 License

MIT