LAB / WMSI-EXP-033

Cyber Monoculture Risk.

Do homogeneous defensive populations share correlated blind spots?

STATUS / PROTOCOL DRAFTPRIORITY / P1 — High valueREGISTRY / 26 SEP 2026 · V1.0

01 / QUESTION

Cyber and Adversarial Interaction

Do homogeneous defensive populations share correlated blind spots?

PLANNED RESEARCH

This is a protocol scaffold, not a completed experiment or a frozen execution plan. No measured effect or research conclusion is claimed here.

Hypothesis to test

The manipulation described below produces a reproducible, condition-specific change in the measured system behavior or internal state that is not explained by the ordinary controls.

Ordinary competing explanation

The observed pattern is explained by ordinary sampling variation, prompt/representation artifacts, surface lexical cues, evaluator bias, or the known product/runtime mechanics captured by the controls.

02 / PLANNED DESIGN

How we intend to test it

Expose homogeneous and heterogeneous teams to a bank of local synthetic attacks.

Controls

Matched compute and tools.

What we would measure

Correlated miss rate, systemic failure probability, coverage diversity.

Access and instruments

Ordinary software or API access. This describes access requirements, not verified readiness on our Spark.

Synthetic cyber range; statistical analysis.

Before a full run

Feasibility=NOW; priority=P1. Before confirmatory execution, run a small pilot to estimate variance/cost, freeze the scoring rules, and assign a run-count target.

Model revisions, final prompts, sample sizes, cost limits, and scoring rules must be settled through the pilot and protocol-freeze process.

03 / INTERPRETATION

What could fool us

External internet leakage, unequal tool access, scenario memorization. Keep all activity isolated and authorized.

What would weaken the idea

If homogeneous teams are no more correlated than heterogeneous teams, monoculture risk weakens.

Observation, inference, speculation, unknowns, and apparatus errors will be labeled separately. One striking transcript cannot establish a general effect.

04 / RECORD

Evidence we plan to preserve

Local synthetic-range state, agent actions, alerts, outcomes, reset hashes.

Planned visual evidence

Failure-correlation matrix; resilience curve.

No research runs or raw datasets are published for this experiment. The September 26, 2026 registry and protocol compendium (version 1.0) are the sources for this planning record.

Back to all 90 experiments