A Unified Framework for Human-AI Collaboration in Security Operations Centers with Trusted Autonomy

In plain words

A security operations centre (SOC) is the team and tooling that watches a company's networks for attacks. Its analysts are flooded with alerts, and most of them turn out to be harmless. This paper asks how much of that work an AI assistant should do on its own, and how much a person should keep.

The authors propose a ladder of five autonomy levels, from fully manual work to fully automated work. Each level says what the human does: checks everything, approves actions, supervises, or only audits. The level for a given task depends on how complicated and risky the task is, and on how far the team trusts the AI. Trust grows with explanations the AI can give, with its track record, and with how certain it is about its answers. Simple, low-risk tasks, such as blocking a known bad address, can run with little human involvement. Hard or risky tasks, such as looking into a new kind of attack, stay with people.

To show the idea, the authors ran an AI assistant in a simulated attack-and- defence exercise. In that test the assistant reduced alert noise and sped up parts of the response. The test was small and not a controlled trial, so the numbers are a sign that the approach is worth trying, not proof that it works.

TL;DR

• Proposes a five-level autonomy scale (Levels 0 to 4) for SOC tasks, each tied to a human-in-the-loop role §4.1, tab. 2.
• Autonomy is a formula in task complexity, risk and trust §3.1, eq. 1; human involvement is 1 minus autonomy §3.2, eq. 2; trust is a weighted sum of explainability, track record and uncertainty §3.3, eq. 3.
• The only evaluation is a simulated wargame case study with an LLM assistant ("CyberAlly"), reporting large author-reported gains without a controlled baseline §6, §6.2.
• No code is published; the weights and most parameters are not stated.

Problem

SOC teams face very high alert volumes, many of them false positives, and shortages of skilled analysts §1, §2.2. The paper argues that most existing SOC automation is either fixed or binary, meaning a task is either automated or manual, and does not account for task complexity, criticality and risk, or for how much trust the AI has earned §1, §2.1. It also argues that trust calibration (avoiding both over-trust and under-trust) and human oversight are not handled systematically §1, §3.3.

Method

Overview. The framework has three pillars: autonomy (A), human-in-the-loop involvement (H), and trust (T) fig. 2, §3. Autonomy is set per task from complexity, risk and trust, mapped to a SOC analyst tier and to an autonomy level, and the human role follows from the level §4, fig. 3.

Step 1: Autonomy. For a task with complexity C, risk R and trust T, all normalised to [0, 1], autonomy is A = 1 − (λ1·C + λ2·R)·(1 − T), with weights λ1, λ2 in [0, 1] §3.1, eq. 1. Higher complexity or risk lowers A; higher trust raises it §3.1. The same formula is restated in §4.1 and §4.4.

Step 2: Human involvement. H = 1 − A §3.2, eq. 2. H = 1 means full human control and H = 0 means full AI autonomy §3.2.

Step 3: Trust. T = α1·E + α2·P + α3·(1 − U), with α1 + α2 + α3 = 1, where E is explainability, P is performance history and U is uncertainty, all in [0, 1] §3.3, eq. 3. Calibrated trust is meant to avoid both over-reliance and under-reliance §3.3, §4.3.

Step 4: Autonomy level. Five levels are defined with the ranges in tab. 2: Level 0 Manual (A ≈ 0), Level 1 AI-assisted (A ≈ 0.2–0.4), Level 2 Semi-autonomous, human approval for critical actions (A ≈ 0.4–0.6), Level 3 Conditionally autonomous, human-on-the-loop (A ≈ 0.7–0.8), and Level 4 Fully autonomous with minimal oversight (A ≈ 0.9–1.0) §4.1. The scale is said to be inspired by SAE J3016 driving automation levels §4.1, ref. 43. The ranges leave gaps (0.6–0.7 and 0.8–0.9) that the paper does not assign tab. 2.

Step 5: HITL mode. Level 1 corresponds to human-in-control (HITL), Levels 2 and 3 to human-on-the-loop (HOtL), and Level 4 to human-out-of-the-loop (HOoTL) §4.2. Fig. 3 draws Level 0 under the HITL column fig. 3.

Step 6: Tiers. Four analyst tiers align with the NIST CSF 2.0 functions: Tier 1 with Identify and Protect; Tier 2 with Detect and Respond; Tier 3 with Detect and Recover; Tier 4 with Govern and Recover §3.4. §4.6 assigns AI levels to these tiers in prose: Tier 1 at Levels 0–1 with AI tools from Level 2; Tier 2 at Levels 2–3; Tier 3 at Levels 3–4; Tier 4 in HOoTL mode §4.6.

Step 7: Example mapping. tab. 4 lists three tasks with ranges for A, H and T. H is the complement of A in each row:

• Blocking a known malicious IP: A 0.8–1.0, H 0–0.2, required trust high tab. 4.
• Phishing classification with human review: A 0.4–0.7, H 0.3–0.6, trust medium tab. 4.
• Investigating a zero-day exploit: A 0.1–0.3, H 0.7–0.9, trust low tab. 4.

tab. 3 gives a qualitative version: Full HITL for zero-day investigation (high complexity, low AI autonomy), and HOtL with fully automated routine tasks for blocking malicious IPs tab. 3.

Step 8: Workflows. fig. 4 is a swimlane diagram of three domains (alerts, threats, response and recovery) with an autonomy level on each step. Alerts: Level 1 has AI correlate alerts and score severity, and Tier-1 analysts review; at Levels 2 and 3 AI auto-dismisses false positives while Tier-2 analysts check the rest §4.7, fig. 4. Threats: Level 2 has AI assist classification and evidence collection, and Level 3 has AI do root-cause analysis and draft responsive actions, with Tier-2 and Tier-3 analysts verifying §4.7. Response: Level 1 recommends containment that Tier-2 approves, Level 2 runs predefined actions via SOAR for moderate-risk events, Level 3 runs playbooks for low-risk incidents, and Level 4 manages end-to-end recovery and reporting §4.7.

Step 9: Situational awareness. SA is treated as the shared state between human and AI, built on the A²C model's self, teammate and world awareness §4.5, ref. 9. Explainability panels and uncertainty scores are proposed as trust-building mechanisms §4.3.

Case study setup. A simulated mid-sized enterprise SOC with a SIEM (Wazuh), host and network intrusion detection, firewalls, EDR and a SOAR platform §6.1. The AI assistant, CyberAlly, is built on a fine-tuned GPT-family model with retrieval-augmented generation over MITRE ATT&CK, threat feeds and network topology, plus knowledge graphs §6.1. Training used two years of simulated incidents and data from five ACDC cyber-defence exercises §6.1. Four Red Team members and ten Blue Team members ran the wargames, with attacks on a maritime port's IT and OT systems in three scenarios §6.1, §6.2. Analysts reviewed decisions and the assistant worked at Level 2 autonomy for major actions §6.1.

# Autonomy, human involvement and trust for one SOC task  [eq. 1-3]
# Inputs are in [0, 1]; the weights are not stated in the paper

def task_autonomy(complexity, risk, trust, lam1, lam2):
    # Autonomy falls with complexity and risk and rises with trust  [eq. 1]
    weighted = lam1 * complexity + lam2 * risk
    return 1 - weighted * (1 - trust)

def trust_score(explainability, performance, uncertainty, a1, a2, a3):
    # Trust from explanations, track record and certainty  [eq. 3]
    # The paper requires a1 + a2 + a3 = 1
    certainty = 1 - uncertainty
    return a1 * explainability + a2 * performance + a3 * certainty

def human_involvement(autonomy):
    # Human share of control is the complement of autonomy  [eq. 2]
    return 1 - autonomy

Hyperparameters

Results

Author-reported. Setup: one simulated SOC wargame with an LLM assistant (CyberAlly), human analysts, and attack scenarios on port IT and OT systems §6.1, §6.2. No control arm, sample sizes, variance or statistical tests are given. The "before AI" and "after AI" periods are not described in enough detail to reproduce.

Headline figures in §7.1 restate these: 50% fewer false positives, 67% faster investigations and 80% lower MTTR §7.1. The numbers are read from text and bar labels; the bar chart categories are small in the PDF, so the text is the primary source.

Paper vs code

No official code. The paper gives no code link, and the arXiv metadata has no comments field with one. The project page is not linked. A GitHub search for "CyberAlly" found one repository, sourav-s-b/cyberally, whose owner is not an author of this paper, so it was not used. A second search for "autonomy trust SOC human-in-the-loop" returned zero repositories.

Pitfalls

• Autonomy can leave [0, 1]. Eq. 1 keeps λ1 and λ2 in [0, 1] but does not require λ1 + λ2 ≤ 1. Then λ1·C + λ2·R can exceed 1, and A can go negative eq. 1. Clip, or require λ1 + λ2 ≤ 1, before mapping to levels. This is a derivation from the stated ranges, not an explicit statement in the paper.
• Levels are not complete. Table 2 leaves 0.6–0.7 and 0.8–0.9 unassigned tab. 2. The thresholds between levels are not given as a rule.
• Level names are inconsistent across sections. §4.2 ties HITL to Level 1 and HOtL to Levels 2–3 §4.2. §4.6 gives tier-to-level ranges that differ from §4.7 for the same tiers §4.6, §4.7. The case study says Level 2 §6.1, §6.2 says Level 1 for detection and triage §6.2, and §6.2 also refers to "Full HITL" during early triage.
• No method for choosing or updating weights. λ1, λ2 and α1–α3 are not set or learned. The paper says trust should grow over time with consistent performance §4.3, but gives no update rule.
• Trust inputs are undefined in practice. How explainability, performance and uncertainty are measured is not stated §3.3.
• The case study is one simulated setup. The Event 3 and 4 histograms and the Table 5 comparison are the authors' own assessments §6.2, tab. 5. The authors call the assistant's false-positive reduction "significant" without a statistical test §6.2.
• Vendor and model details. The assistant is described as built on OpenAI's GPT models with domain fine-tuning §6.1. The version, prompts, retrieval settings and knowledge-graph construction are not stated.
• Scope. Protection is excluded from the workflows "for simplicity" §4.7. NIST CSF 2.0 governance aspects are out of scope §2.3, footnote 1.

Lineage

• Builds on: SAE J3016 driving automation levels, used as the analogy for the five-level scale §4.1, ref. 43; NIST CSF 2.0 for the tier mapping §3.4, ref. 41.
• Related frameworks: A²C (Automate, Augment, Collaborate) for shared situational awareness §4.5, §5, ref. 9; the SOC Automation Matrix and levels-of-automation work by Tilbury and Flowerday §5; the cognitive hierarchy deep RL model for cloud SOCs by Aref et al. §5, ref. 5.
• Prior system: the CyberAlly assistant is described in arXiv:2504.07457, cited as ref. [22] §6, ref. 22.
• Comparison: Table 5 places this work against related frameworks on SOC function coverage and autonomy range. The table is the authors' own assessment tab. 5.