Critical infrastructure faces bridge-scale cybersecurity risk

Transcript

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

1. 13:13

   Well, I think that, you know, we work with democracies. And I think that with the wide availability of AI that's offensively capable, the software that powers things like the electric grid or air traffic control or these systems. I mean, it's hard to drive home maybe to Twitter viewers like how important this stuff is, but this software was not designed to withstand sustained at-scale use of intelligent AI to attack it.

2. 13:42

   I think that if we don't fix the code quickly and automatically and in an airtight way, you're basically guaranteed to enable adversarial actors to exploit those bugs and you put a lot of the country at risk. So I just think it's a matter of time. It's kind of when, not if you verify all the critical code. And I think it's good that governments are paying attention to it. You brought up a really important point. Maybe the mainstream person on X when they're scrolling doesn't totally realize how close we are to things not working like critical infrastructure like our power grid you mentioned or air like supply chain whatever that might be and so if you're communicating straight to the audience right now straight to people on x make the case why is this important i'm going to borrow an analogy that um an ex-secretary of defense told me so the analogy is i think the world of

3. 14:44

   cybersecurity right now is imagine if every bridge in America we discovered that had some critical defect in the materials used to make it. So there's a problem with the concrete and it has really bad cracks after some amount of time. We basically have to replace all those bridges immediately. And if you face that kind of problem in a society, this isn't the kind of thing where you're like, oh, it's kind of expensive. Let's just do it later. You kind of have to do it right now. I would say that the cybersecurity risk to national infrastructure is about as bad as having damage in every bridge in the country. That's like the scale of the problem. So that's how I drive it home. And yet when it comes to a bridge, it's a huge human logistics problem.

4. 15:27

   We have to figure out how to get the concrete and the materials. This is easier to fix. This is easier to fix. So do you have any estimates here on timelines? What is the urgency that's actually happening maybe amongst governments and these systems will the timeline by this time next year do you think all of our infrastructure will be a lot more hardened a lot more secure or do you think by a year from now we're going to be feeling this problem more than ever before i think a lot of problems will be addressed i think that people are moving quickly also with tools like aristotle i mean the problem is if if you try to rewrite your code in a way that's not verified, you don't really know that you did it right. With Aristotle, you're guaranteed that the behavior is the same. Sorry, with formal

5. 16:09

   verification in general, you can verify that anything that happens in the old version of the code happens in the new one, but it's more secure with memory safety or whatever. So I think that unlike a year ago, the technology now exists to be able to do all these giant rewrites, make everything safe. So I think that people understand the danger and will apply the technology. Yeah. Are you seeing that urgency as well within companies, within other countries?