AI gives defenders a window to find and fix security flaws

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:08

   And we're doing that across every aspect of how we think about the product. One of the biggest shifts in the discourse around AI recently has been around cyber and how do you build secure systems that are resistant to AI driven cyber approaches and so I'm just a little bit curious how you're thinking about that how are you building guardrails or how you're approaching the different aspects of cyber security well first of all I do think the physics of cyber security are changing and we're in what we call the defenders window and the way that I think about this window is that we have peak frontier AI capabilities that can help defenders secure themselves.

2. 26:42

   They're not broadly diffused yet, but the broadly diffused capabilities are ratcheting. And you can see this from each model release to model release from providers across the world. The capabilities on cyber that are available to everyone are going up and you're starting to see the leading edges of some of the impacts, right? You're starting to see, for example, in South Korea that there were some high profile hacks of banks that were driven by different models. And I think that the picture that is so critical is that defenders need to use this time. And so we have been working very hard to be able to responsibly give access through our Daybreak program to defenders to be able to use our peak intelligence or use very capable models to find and fix vulnerabilities in their systems.

3. 27:28

   And one thing that is very important to realize is these flaws have existed, right? It's every line of human written code in some ways that you have to ask, is this secure? Was the developer trained in the right way? And you just start to realize that the way in which we built systems were kind of fundamentally insecure. And we always knew it, right? There's never been a CISO who's been over-resourced.

4. 27:53

   Yeah. I mean, you can look at XKCD in the comic of like all the world's infrastructure reliant on like one open source project written by one dude in his basement, right? Or Heartbleed or anything that predated like all these AI issues. Exactly. And so I think that to me, and I think very importantly, it's very important to realize that these are really human issues, right? These are the way that we chose to build the internet.

5. 28:14

   It was security got kind of bolted on, right? And we had high profile incidents, right? You think about early worms and viruses, and then people started to realize, well, we need virus scanning software, right? And we need to have encryption for requests over HTTP. Yes, all of these mechanisms were ones where I think that we kind of took the slower route in order to add security on afterwards. Like the Internet's really been built for resilience, not necessarily for security.

6. 28:45

   And I think that what we're going to see now is a moment where a lot of that debt, a lot of that tech debt is going to come to the surface. It's time for us to pay it down. And that as a company, we are really leaning into trying to help with this moment. So, for example, we have a billion dollar commitment that we've made to help frontline defenders get access to our models and utilize them for defense that we're studying and trying to find different vulnerabilities out there.

7. 29:14

   And then thinking about how do we help the world respond? How do we coordinate incident response? How do we work with government? How do we work with the community in order to land these as well as possible and to help people navigate through? But I think that people have not yet really internalized how much the physics around cybersecurity are going to change. I think we will end up, I think there's an opportunity to end up with a much more secure world, right?

8. 29:36

   You think about the fact that AI lets you pay down your tech debt in a way that was just previously unthinkable. The fact that you could do things like formal verification of software. Like these models are obviously great at proving things. Why not prove security properties of software? That's something that the technology has kind of been there for people, but it's just so much work. Painful, niche, expensive.

9. 29:56

   Exactly. No one does it for anything significant. And so I think all of that can change. And I think the world we're moving to right now, and we've done this internally within OpenAI, is every time a new model drops, you need to apply it to secure yourself, find your vulnerabilities, and then saturate. And so, for example, we took about 25% of our production engineers and said, all of your projects are on hold.

10. 30:18

    You are just securing now. and took our peak intelligence model at the time, had it poke at all of our infrastructure, rate team a bunch of things, built some tools so that it's easy to do it again over time. And we found a number of issues, we fixed it. And at some point we saturated the issues that this model was capable of finding. And that's a very good story, right? It's like, I think that the thing to realize is that we're gonna have a next model.

11. 30:41

    We're gonna have to repeat that process and that that will continue. But at some point, again, I think if you think about, well, the code that's being written, So we're actually, so much of it is now AI-assisted. We can actually train these models, and we are training these models to write secure code from the beginning. And so I think we can have sort of fundamentally more secure systems through the use and applications of these AI models in the right way.

12. 31:03

    So it sounds like basically there's going to be a period of time where maybe we're going to see more of these cyber attacks, more incidents, etc. as humanity or as people sort of catch up in terms of their court bases getting more and more secure, using more AI-generated code that's sort of preset to be more secure. And so we'll probably end up with some transitionary period over time where, you know, we'll have more offense and defense and then defense will catch up.

13. 31:25

    I mean, that's kind of the consensus I've been hearing in the industry in general. And it seems like the most likely Ford case, at least. Yeah, look, I have a lot of optimism about how we can navigate this moment. I think it does require a coordinated response, right? It really requires defenders to internalize how the physics of cybersecurity are changing, that there is this window where that window is not going to last forever, right? And that you should think about, we're shifting to this world where the security of an organization is related to both the fundamentals that they've gotten right, which is kind of a one-time investment, but also the level of cyber capability they've used to defend themselves. And as we shift to that world, I think that we can be in a world where defenders are able to outstrip attackers, but it is going to take a lot of change, right? It's going

14. 32:18

    to take a sort of change in terms of how we think about every organization operating and how we collectively think about critical infrastructure and resourcing those that have sort of not had those resources to date. I think your example, I mean, your description of this is like, let's say like internet-wide tech debt and then your response to it internally is a really good one