Lujo Bauer and Vyas Sekar
The world is approaching a pivotal moment where advances in AI, critical infrastructure, and cybersecurity are rapidly converging. The U.S. has the opportunity to stay a step ahead of its adversaries, employing AI and automation to help prevent and protect our critical infrastructure from attack. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab are at the forefront of this work.
Why it matters: AI is already changing how cyber threats evolve. With increasing use of AI for code generation and workflow automation, our ability to quickly build and deploy new features far exceeds our ability to secure systems.
At the same time as new cyber threats are emerging, we are relying more heavily on AI and autonomous systems within the nation’s critical industries and infrastructure, including energy, water, transportation and health and financial services.
Catch up quick: Existing mechanisms, protocols, and processes used to secure our critical infrastructures are based on a “human attacker”’ mindset. Today’s security operations rely on manually predefined rules that grant or deny access based on simple heuristic factors and human time scale responses.
CMU researchers have observed the use of AI-driven autonomous capabilities for uncovering and exploiting vulnerabilities dramatically accelerating attacks. The threats to our critical infrastructure will increase significantly and our existing mechanisms are no longer sufficient. The U.S. needs to invest in autonomous cyber operations for defending critical infrastructures against future autonomous cyberthreats.
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