Shared Failure Modes in Defense-in-Depth
- Entity ID:
ent-20260423-p2a004000001 - Type:
concept - Scope:
private - Status:
active
Description
Paper's thesis that layered safety architecture rests on an independence assumption that can fail when layers share common performance constraints. Example: commands with >50 subcommands fall back to a single generic approval prompt instead of per-subcommand deny-rule checks because per-subcommand parsing caused UI freezes. Structural tension between safety and performance.
Key claims
- Defense-in-depth layers can share failure modes under performance pressure