Zeron Open-Sources HSES and CRML to Advance Foundational Cyber Risk Intelligence
Most cybersecurity failures do not originate from defective controls or absent tooling. They emerge from socio-technical systems that fail to model how humans make decisions under operational stress.
Today, Zeron announced the open-source release of two foundational frameworks designed to formalize cyber risk as a continuously computable system: the Human Security Exploitability System (HSES) and the Cyber Risk Modeling Language (CRML).
Both HSES and CRML are fully open-sourced, specification-driven, and transparently defined, enabling independent inspection, validation, and extension. Zeron’s position is that cyber risk infrastructure must be auditable at the semantic level to be operationally trusted.
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Together, these frameworks establish a shift from static, control-centric assessments to continuous, human-aware cyber risk intelligence.
HSES: Modeling Human Exploitability as a System Property
Despite extensive investment in automation and detection, empirical incident data continues to show that a majority of security failures originate from human decision-making under fatigue, alert saturation, and time compression. Conventional risk frameworks treat this as residual or non-quantifiable.
HSES treats it as a first-class risk surface.
The Human Security Exploitability System models human exploitability as an emergent system property, derived from measurable operational variables including alert volume, decision latency, cognitive load, workflow design, escalation paths, and organizational feedback loops.
Key characteristics of HSES:
- Defines human exploitability surfaces independent of individual fault
- Models’ exploitability as a function of system conditions, not intent
- Enables early detection of unsafe operating regimes prior to incident manifestation
HSES is published with a transparent methodology, explicit assumptions, and clearly defined variables, allowing practitioners and researchers to evaluate, challenge, and evolve the model.
CRML: A Foundational Language for Cyber Risk Systems
While HSES specifies where risk emerges, CRML defines the underlying structure by which cyber risk is represented, computed, and reasoned about.
CRML is an open-source, domain-specific language designed to serve as foundational infrastructure for cyber risk modeling. It provides the formal primitives required to describe assets, controls, dependencies, assumptions, uncertainty, and impact pathways in a machine-executable form.
CRML is intentionally positioned below dashboards, reports, and scoring frameworks. It is not an overlay or abstraction layer; it is the substrate upon which higher-order risk systems are built.
CRML enables:
- Deterministic representation of risk logic and dependency graphs
- Continuous computation of exposure as telemetry, controls, or context change
- Full traceability from raw signals to business-aligned impact
By exposing its grammar, evaluation of semantics, and inference paths, CRML ensures that cyber risk reasoning remains inspectable, explainable, and auditable, avoiding reliance on opaque or proprietary scoring models.
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Composable, Transparent, and Continuously Evaluated Risk
Most existing security programs assume stable human performance and static system boundaries. Real-world environments violate both assumptions.
By integrating HSES-derived human exploitability signals into CRML-based models, Zeron enables organizations to compute cyber risk as a dynamic function of technical state, human-system interaction, and organizational design.
This approach supports:
- Continuous risk evaluation rather than point-in-time assessment
- Explicit modeling of human-driven variability and uncertainty
- Decision-grade outputs suitable for executive governance and regulatory scrutiny
The result is a foundational, composable risk intelligence layer that can evolve alongside the enterprise.
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