Abstract
This disclosure describes how certified services and AI systems respond to a critical flaw or a fast-moving attack by stepping down to a safe mode declared in advance, rather than staying exposed or going dark. Each service declares a ladder of safe modes, such as full service, reduced service without logins or forms, read-only service, a static snapshot of essential pages, and offline, and states which functions are essential and must survive every step. Each service also declares its components, including software libraries, language runtimes, models, agents and data sources, by their lifelong identifiers. When an accredited advisory issuer publishes a signed advisory naming a flawed component and a severity, the registry follows the identifier graph to every service that declares that component, and each service steps down automatically to the mode the advisory and its own declaration require, within minutes and without waiting for staff. When no advisory yet exists, corroborated attack signals from a real-time quarantine network can trigger a step-down for an unknown flaw, based on behaviour. Owners are notified at once and may override with a signed decision. To prevent safe mode itself from being used as a weapon, advisories at the highest levels need signatures from a quorum of independent issuers, every step-down has a maximum duration, essential functions are never removed, rate limits apply, and every trigger is recorded and open to review. Once a patch is verified, the service reopens in stages, first to a small share of traffic under watch and then fully, with a signed record of each step. The disclosure also sets out safe-mode profiles for future classes of threat, including flaws found and exploited by AI within hours, poisoned software updates, flaws in AI models that spread between agents, poisoned data discovered after use, breaks in cryptography, failures of cloud providers, forged emergency notices, and attacks on robots and other physical systems.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Edward D. H., "SI Safe Mode™: Declared, Graded Safe Modes for Certified Services and AI Systems, Entered Automatically When Signed Advisories or Corroborated Attack Signals Match Their Declared Components, Keeping Essential Functions Running instead of Going Dark, Protected against Forged or Abusive Triggers, and Reopened in Verified Stages, with Profiles for Future Classes of Flaws and Attacks", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12571