DHS promotes the intentional AI approach for cybersecurity

Artificial intelligence is a tool that federal agencies discover are important promises in the processing of the quantities of cybersecurity data generated by an ever -increasing number of parameters. Hemant Baidwan, Director of Information Security of the Ministry of Internal Security, said that AI and automatic learning have been helping to do so for some time now. But AI is not a whole and an end.

“I see a great value on this,” said Baidwan on Federal monthly badges – Improvement of cybersecurity thanks to a management of autonomous ending points. “I would say that it is always necessary for human intervention and that good people analyze what these AI tools provide. But can that help speed things up? Certainly. And that has done so for some time. Can this continue? I completely believe it can. ”

And this is necessary, said Baidwan, because it is not only the federal agencies that use these tools. While government cybersecurity experts use them to detect models and identify anomalies that indicate malicious action within systems and networks, the bad players also use them to initiate these malicious actions.

“Technology is evolving with AI now,” he said. “The bad actors also evolve. We are no longer confronted – and by “we”, I do not only want to say the DHS. I mean the private sector, the public sector, all of us as citizens of this country – everyone is faced with different threats from what we face years ago. Adversaries, they become smarter, they become faster.

This is why it is necessary that agencies use the same tools, said Baidwan. He described cybersecurity as a functionally arms race, and AI is the last and largest weapon – both for the offensive and the defense.

Make a responsible and secure AI

But like any weapon, whether offensive or defensive, the AI ​​needs railing to ensure that government agencies manage it responsible. Although the DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, specifically created the ministry’s AI working group to examine these problems and determine how the DHS could better go ahead with the AI ​​in a responsible and safe manner, Baidwan said that the CISO council also met this challenge.

This led the Council to publish a cybersecurity strategy of the AI ​​which aligns both with the work force of the AI ​​and the global roadmap of the DHS.

“These two have really helped us, as an organism of Ciso Council, to see how we want to apply cybersecurity to the use of AI within the department? How to make sure that the AI ​​we use within the department is secure? ” Said Baidwan. “It really targets the secure part of the deployment of AI for our mission.”

In turn, the DHS last year has become one of the first agencies to issue an AI cybersecurity policy, he added.

Targeting

When it comes to applying AI – or any other cybersecurity tool – DHS has developed a unique approach to determine where the need is the greatest and how to best meet this need. The unified cybersecurity maturity model is a framework that helps DHS analyze the maturity of cybersecurity for a given program, system or agency. The UCMM allows the ministry to prioritize these vulnerabilities, especially when they can appear in systems with different degrees of criticality.

For example, if the UCMM identifies common weakness areas throughout the department, the DHS can also look for examples where this weakness has been attenuated. The identification of common maturity areas allows the DHS to “Copy and paste as possible in other systems and components, ”said Baidwan.