cs.CRSep 28, 2026
SaveThe Compiler May Read It, the Agent May Not: Keeping Part of a Research Code Away from a Coding Agent
Organizations: University of Iowa
Abstract
The compiler must read modules a physics-based solver cannot build without; the coding agent must not read that intellectual property. The harness does not ship that rule. We classified fifteen read routes against a container, permission rules and a sandbox. None of the three can tell which program is reading.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Which mechanism covers which route. The fifteen routes of Table I , placed by the mechanism whose rule refuses them in this deployment. The permission rules and the sandbox overlap on two routes, and five routes fall outside both.
| route | command | container | permission | sandbox | instruction |
| what it names | account, | command text, | a path | a purpose | |
| mounts | a path | ||||
| direct read | cat f | – | |||
| byte-to-text encoder | base64 f | – | |||
| interpreter, path in a literal A | python3 -c "open(’f’).read()" | – | |||
| shell builtin redirection A | while IFS= read -r l; do echo "$l"; done < f | – |
TABLE I: Route coverage. Fifteen ways the protected bytes can reach the agent’s context, the command for each ( f is the protected file), and which mechanism covers the route in this deployment. Sources, as superscripts: (C) a 2003 catalogue of indirect paths to a resource, (V) the vendor’s own statements of scope, (A) shell constructs from the author’s earlier published disclosure, (O) a published demonstration with the same agent, (D) follows from the shipped rule set and the documented matching semantics. The first two routes need no source.
| Shobhan Roy is a postdoctoral research scholar at IIHR–Hydroscience & Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. His research interests include computational multiphysics, high-performance computing, and machine-learning surrogates for simulation. Roy received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Iowa. He is a member of ACM SIGHPC. Contact him at shobhan-roy@uiowa.edu. |