Black Hat 2023: Delving Into the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity
Black Hat 2023 conference is taken over by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and how cybersecurity products can evolve with this new technology.
- Approximately 40,000 people from 120 countries are expected to converge at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center over six days for Black Hat 2023.
- While the Black Hat 2023 fervor commenced late last week on Saturday, August 5, the conference started with a keynote address from Maria Markstedter, founder of Azeria Labs, on Wednesday.
- Predictably, this 27th edition of the Black Hat conference is taken over by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and how cybersecurity products can evolve with this new technology.
The Black Hat 2023 is underway in Las Vegas, NV. The annual conference, considered the holy grail of cybersecurity, features training sessions, product launches and demonstrations, briefings, expert talks, and more.
While the Black Hat 2023 fervor commenced late last week on Saturday, August 5, 2023, with training, exams, etc., the actual conference kicked off with an introduction by Black Hat and DEF CON founder Jeff Moss, a.k.a. Dark Tangent, and a keynote address from Maria Markstedter, founder of Azeria Labs, on Wednesday.
Approximately 40,000 people from 120 countries are expected to converge at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center over six days, and then some for DEF CON (August 10-13, 2023) to hear, test, observe, and experiment with what worked in cybersecurity this past year, and where the industry is lagging.
Predictably, this 27th edition of the Black Hat conference is taken over, right at the onset with the keynote, by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). The keynote by Markstedter, ‘Guardians of the AI Era: Navigating the Cybersecurity Landscape of Tomorrow,’ reiterated the AI threat to cybersecurity by comparing AI models to “a troubled teenager.”
Markstedter is an expert in Arm reverse engineering and binary exploitation, while her company, Azeria Labs, provides ARM exploit development, reverse engineering, vulnerability research, and cybersecurity training to corporates.
In a scathing ridicule of the AI race that kicked off after the launch of ChatGPT late in November 2022, Markstedter joked, “It [AI] lies, it makes stuff up, conspires, and is completely unpredictable, yet people trust it. So thankfully, it is now in the safe hands of big tech companies racing against time to compete for market penetration.”
Markstedter compared the emergence of AI with the release of the first iPhone, as have many industry leaders. While iPhone indeed marked a paradigm shift in how we used mobile phones, Markstedter made a point to clarify that it was laden with security bugs.
“Do you remember the first version of the iPhone?” she asked. “It was so insecure — everything was running as root. It was riddled with critical bugs. It lacked exploit mitigations or sandboxing. That didn’t stop us from pushing out the functionality and for businesses to become part of that ecosystem.”
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That’s where we’re headed with generative AI, i.e., with the “move fast break sh*t” model.
However, it’s not just the corporations contending to dominate the market(s) through large language models (LLM) and generative AI tech. Smaller companies also seek to harness the power of AI, as evident from Arsenal, the event’s product demo section.
The premise is that AI will help advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, nation-state actors, and even the run-of-the-mill hacker to expedite their malicious operations. As part of the incident response, organizations believe cyber defenses must be automated to eliminate the human angle and aid decision-making.
“If you’re not thinking about the emerging risks of these models deployed within your enterprise or the products and services that you’re responsible for, you are doing it wrong,” Markstedter added.
One of the things that companies often fail to understand is product positioning versus actual capabilities. While companies position their security products to be AI-enhanced, they may not necessarily have the necessary data to rely on to make the right decisions.
As such, these products may not be relevant even a couple of years down the line, making it essential to collect the right data while being mindful of the goal to pave the way for AI-driven development of security products.
Cybersecurity company Tanium unveiled a new feature, Investigate, in its portfolio. Chris Hallum, Tanium‘s director of product marketing, explained how Investigate embodies data-driven incident response.
“When an incident happens, it’s a race against the clock. You need to get this thing addressed as quickly as possible. So, by bringing all those data sources together and putting them into a timeline, first of all, they don’t have to go hunt and find the data; the data is all there,” Hallum said.
He added, “Also, because it’s in a timeline, you can start to see the relationships between different events, and you can maybe ascertain the root cause of an issue more quickly because it’s just put in the context of time.”
Markstedter also pointed out that cybersecurity needs more workforce with relevant AI-related skills and knowledge. “There are already new job flavors emerging out of these new challenges,” she said.
“We need to rethink our concepts of identity access management in a world of truly autonomous systems having access to our apps,” Markstedter said in conclusion.
“It’s been a few years since a technology has disrupted our current state of security as much as this one. So, we need to learn about the very technology that’s changing our systems and our threat models to address these emerging problems. Technological changes are new, but to us, tech is always evolving. That part of security isn’t new.”
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