Hypothesis
Within a bounded scenario family, a typed specification that includes security properties and evidence requirements can reduce invalid experiments and reproduction effort compared with separately authored infrastructure, attack scripts and graders, without an unacceptable increase in cost or loss of fidelity.
Three subordinate hypotheses make the proposal testable. First, property-aware validation can catch semantically invalid scenarios that ordinary configuration validation accepts. Second, independent state observations can improve outcome classification over output-only grading when attacks cause hidden side effects. Third, explicit replay contracts can distinguish deterministic fixture replay from probabilistic repetition against a live model.
The thesis should be rejected or narrowed if benefits disappear against a well-integrated existing harness, if each new scenario still needs extensive custom plumbing, or if validation cannot detect common causes of false security conclusions.
Dynamic environments and scenario generation
Start with human-authored templates and constrained transformations. Add or remove an authorization control, adjust document trust, change one tool permission, or vary a network edge. Each mutation must identify the property it preserves or intentionally changes. Unrestricted generation should remain long-term research.
A future natural-language interface would produce a candidate specification through catalog retrieval and typed construction. A deterministic validator would reject unsupported resources, unspecified identities, prohibited egress, missing resource limits and ungrounded vulnerability assumptions. A researcher would inspect the resolved plan before execution.
The main scientific question is semantic preservation, not whether a language model can emit YAML. Compare natural-language generation against expert templates and constrained non-LLM generation. Count rejected outputs, manual repairs and failed witness tests, not just successfully parsed configurations.
A compiler cannot certify arbitrary software behavior. Claims must be bounded to the properties, adapters and scenario families whose validation procedures have been tested. Formal methods may help with a finite policy or topology model; they do not make an unmodeled agent or external API deterministic.
Actual R&D versus product engineering
Routine engineering includes account management, classroom UI, billing, container lifecycle, deployment adapters, standard event ingestion and browser delivery. These can be difficult operational work without constituting new research.
R&D includes defining tractable equivalence relations for security experiments, checking property preservation under scenario mutation, validating evaluators against incomplete or adversarial evidence, and quantifying fidelity loss when real services are replaced with controlled fixtures. Cross-boundary provenance under asynchronous execution is another candidate if comparisons establish an improvement over existing tracing.
Building a novel schema is not enough. Each candidate contribution needs a baseline, an experimental result and a statement of its limits. Use existing infrastructure wherever its behavior already meets the contract.