Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer at Facebook and Yahoo, outlines how AI is changing both offense and defense in information security.
Many of the talks at the HumanX conference about AI here bubbled over with positivity about the technology’s potential, but its last afternoon of programming featured a speaker with a different message: slow your roll.
“When it comes to AI and cyber, we’re not even close to 1% done here”, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at infosec firm SentinelOne. “The changes that are going to happen in this world are all ahead of us.”
Much of the discussion about AI security has involved the failures of AI models. Stamos outlined three different ways they can malfunction: traditional security failings in which an attacker gets “a system to violate the basic precepts of what its developer wanted it to do”; safety malfunctions in which it “causes harm to a human being”; and “alignment” failures in which an AI system errs on its own—like a customer-service chatbot “getting frustrated and calling my customers names.”
“Mixing these things up is causing a lot of trouble for folks who mix them up because then you’re not able to distinguish and to test these things separately,” Stamos warned.
But the bigger picture of AI security involves what AI tools are doing to change Stamos’s own business. He previously worked as the CISO at Yahoo and then Facebook and now also teaches computer-science classes at Stanford University.
“The future for cyber is human beings supervising machine-to-machine combat,” he said.
On the defensive side, AI systems already automate much of the monitoring and analysis that humans in security operations centers did years ago, leaving it up to that human to decide what defensive action to take in response.
