Abstract
The current discussions surrounding AI has often focused on its beneficial aspects such as its positive use in various sectors. AI has also been discussed from a science fiction perspective in which AI operates at will. While the dark side of AI has also been discussed to some extent, this discussion has often centered on the privacy concerns or ethical implications of AI. However, a new disturbing phenomenon concerning the dark side of AI is developing. That is an emergence of a rise in AI-facilitated cyberattacks, the discussion of which is the missing piece in the existing literature. In view of this, this chapter aims to provide an analysis of the ways in which AI can be maliciously used to carry out AI-enabled cyberattacks. Accordingly, the chapter also offers a number of recommendations to mitigate the risks associated with the adversarial use of AI. This chapter is intended to provide a reference point for experts and forward-thinking analysts at a time when the debate over how we might address the many security challenges that AI poses has become the most serious concern for law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as other security experts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen G (2020) Understanding AI technology. Technical report, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) The Pentagon United States
Allen G, Chan T (2017) Artificial intelligence and national security. Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Cambridge, MA
Anderson HS, Woodbridge J, Filar B (2016) Deepdga: Adversarially-tuned domain generation and detection. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM workshop on artificial intelligence and security, pp 13–21
Anlyz (2020) Zero-day exploits – malware analysis tools. https://anlyz.co/blog/malware-analysis-tools-zero-day-vulnerabilities/. Accessed 21 June 2021
Artificial Intelligence Index (2017) The artificial intelligence index: 2017 annual report. Technical report, Technical report
Bachelder S (2019) Cybersecurity architecture network segmentation best practices guide. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cybersecurity-architecture-network-segmentation-best-guide-bachelder. Accessed 24 May 2021
Barnett Jr T (2016) The zettabyte era officially begins (how much is that?). SP360: Service Provider, September, 9
BBC News (2018) Well-organised’ gang flew drones carrying drugs into prisons. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45358876. Accessed 15 June 2021
Belfield H (2019) How to respond to the potential malicious uses of artificial intelligence? J Unsolve Quest 9(2):5–6
Bogomolov A (2019) Digitisation in science. J Unsolve Quest 9(2):1–4
Brundage M, Avin S, Clark J, Toner H, Eckersley P, Garfinkel B, Dafoe A, Scharre P, Zeitzoff T, Filar B, et al (2018) The malicious use of artificial intelligence: Forecasting, prevention, and mitigation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.07228
Coombs T (2018) Artificial intelligence & cybersecurity for dummies, IBM Limited Edition. Wiley John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, USA
Corera G (2021) Spy agency turns to AI to tackle child abuse. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56182274. Accessed 29 Apr 2021
Dean J, Ghemawat S (2008) Mapreduce: simplified data processing on large clusters. Commun ACM 51(1):107–113
DeepMind (2021) DeepMind. Google. https://deepmind.com/. Accessed 20 June 2021
Durbin S (2020) How criminals use artificial intelligence to fuel cyber attacks. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/10/13/how-criminals-use-artificial-intelligence-to-fuel-cyber-attacks/?sh=1db483ca5012. note. Accessed 23 Feb 2021
ExpertAI (2020) What is machine learning? A definition
Fields C (2016) Report of the defense science board summer study on autonomy. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Washington, DC
GCHQ (2021) Pioneering a new national security: the ethics of artificial intelligence. https://www.gchq.gov.uk/files/GCHQAIPaper.pdf. Accessed 29 Apr 2021
Gil Y, Selman B (2019) A 20-year community roadmap for artificial intelligence research in the us. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.02624
Goodfellow IJ, Pouget-Abadie J, Mirza M, Xu B, Warde-Farley D, Ozair S, Courville A, Bengio Y (2014) Generative adversarial networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.2661
Gregory J (2020) AI security threats: the real risk behind science fiction scenarios. Security Intelligence. https://securityintelligence.com/articles/ai-security-threats-risk/. Accessed 20 May 2021
Griffin K (2015) What is the internet of things?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/what-is-the-internet-of-things-google. note. Accessed 07 Dec 2020
Griffin K (2017) Facebook’s artificial intelligence robots Shut down after they start talking to each other in their own language. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html. note. Accessed 15 Apr 2021
Gunning D, Aha D (2019) DarpaŠs explainable artificial intelligence (xai) program. AI Mag 40(2):44–58
Hoadley DS, Lucas NJ (2018) Artificial intelligence and national security. Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC
IBM Security (2018) Overcome cybersecurity limitations with artificial intelligence. https://youtu.be/-tIPoLin1WY, note. Accessed 17 Mar 2021
Ilachinski A (2017) AI, robots, and swarms: issues, questions, and recommended studies. CNA Corporation, Arlington
Karpathy A (2015) Breaking linear classifiers on imagenet. http://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/. note. Accessed 20 June 2021
Kelleher K (2017) How artificial intelligence is quietly changing how you shop online. Time. https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/. note. Accessed 20 June 2021
Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE (2012) Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. Adv Neural Inf Proces Syst 25:1097–1105
Li C, Wand M (2016) Precomputed real-time texture synthesis with markovian generative adversarial networks. In European conference on computer vision, pp 702–716. Springer
Manky D (2019) Delving into the weaponization of AI. https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/opinions/weaponization-ai/. Accessed 22 May 2021
Markoff J (2012) How many computers to identify a cat? 16,000. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html. Accessed 23 June 2021
Marr B (2019) The 10 best examples of how companies use artificial intelligence in practice. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/12/09/the-10-best-examples-of-how-companies-use-artificial-intelligence-in-practice/?sh=59cf46cd7978. note. Accessed 20 June 2021
Marr B (2020) How much data is there in the world?. https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1846. note. Accessed 16 Feb 2021
MarshMcLennan (2021) Global cyber terrorism incidents on the rise. https://www.mmc.com/insights/publications/2018/nov/global-cyber-terrorism-incidents-on-the-rise.html. Accessed 12 Apr 2021
McCallion J (2014) Parkinson’s disease to be tracked by wearables. https://www.alphr.com/news/390259/parkinsons-disease-to-be-tracked-by-wearables. note. Accessed 07 Dec 2020
Miley K (2020) AI-powered cyber attacks. https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/cisotociso/ai-powered-cyber-attacks. note. Accessed 15 Apr 2021
Mirsky Y, Mahler T, Shelef I, Elovici Y (2019) Ct-gan: Malicious tampering of 3d medical imagery using deep learning. In 28th {USENIX} security symposium ({USENIX} security 19), pp 461–478
Montasari R, Hill R (2019) Next-generation digital forensics: challenges and future paradigms. In 2019 IEEE 12th international conference on global security, safety and sustainability (ICGS3). IEEE, pp 205–212
Montasari R, Carroll F, Macdonald S, Jahankhani H, Hosseinian-Far A, Daneshkhah A (2021) Application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in producing actionable cyber threat intelligence. In Digital forensic investigation of internet of things (IoT) devices. Springer, pp 47–64
Nguyen-Duy J (2021) Overcoming the edge security reality of real 5G. https://www.the5gexchange.com/author.asp?section_id=743&doc_id=766681&. Accessed 21 June 2021
Nilsson NJ (2009) The quest for artificial intelligence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Omdia (2020) Technology research that connects the dots. https://omdia.tech.informa.com/. Accessed 21 June 2021
OpenAI (2018) AI and compute. https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/. Accessed 13 Mar 2021
OTI (2015) Technical assessment autonomy. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a616999.pdf.note. Accessed 16 Feb 2021
Polly (2020) How has AI changed the trading industry?. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/06/04/how-has-ai-changed-the-trading-industry/32770/. note. Accessed 20 June 2021
Reinsel D, Gantz J, Rydning J (2018) The digitization of the world from edge to core. International Data Corporation, Framingham
Ryan M (2017) Building a future: integrated human-machine military organization. https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/12/11/building-a-future-integrated-human-machine-military-organization. Accessed 16 Feb 2021
Ryan M (2018) Integrating humans and machines. https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/1/2/integrating-humans-and-machines. Accessed 16 Feb 2021
Sartor G, Loreggia A (2020) The impact of algorithms for online content filtering or moderation. European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/657101/IPOL_STU(2020)657101_EN.pdf. Accessed: 20 June 2021
Sas (n.d.) What it is and why it matters. https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/what-is-artificial-intelligence.html. Accessed 21 June 2021
Paul Scharre. Autonomous weapons and operational risk, 2016
Scharre P (2017a) Highlighting artificial intelligence: an interview with Paul scharre. Strateg Stud Q 11(4):18–19
Scharre P (2017b) The lethal autonomous weapons governmental meeting (Part I: Coping with Rapid Technological Change). Just Security. https://www.justsecurity.org/46889/lethal-autonomous-weapons-governmental-meeting-part-i-coping-rapid-technological-change/. Accessed: 23 June 2021
Slayer KM (2020) Artificial intelligence and national security. Technical report, Congressional Research SVC Washington United States
Soni D (2018) Introduction to evolutionary algorithms: optimization by natural selection. https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-evolutionary-algorithms-a8594b484ac. note. Accessed 15 Apr 2021
Splunk (n.d.) What is cybersecurity analytics?. https://www.splunk.com/en_us/data-insider/what-is-cybersecurity-analytics.html. Accessed 21 June 2021
Stone M (2020) Why adversarial examples are such a dangerous threat to deep learning. IBM. https://securityintelligence.com/articles/why-adversarial-examples-are-such-a-dangerous-threat-to-deep-learning/, note. Accessed 19 May 2021
The Economist (2018) Getting to grips with military robotics. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/01/25/getting-to-grips-with-military-robotics. Accessed 23 June 2021
Tucker P (2018) Here’s how to stop squelching new ideas, Eric SchmidtŠs Advisory Board Tells DoD. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/01/heres-how-stop-squelching-new-ideas-eric-schmidts-advisory-board-tells-dod/145240/. Accessed 23 June 2021
Vorobeychik Y, Kantarcioglu M (2018) Adversarial machine learning. Synth Lect Artif Intell Mach Learn 12(3):1–169
Wang Q, Guo W, Zhang K, Ororbia AG, Xing X, Liu X, Giles CL (2017) Adversary resistant deep neural networks with an application to malware detection. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 1145–1153
Yang Chen, Lai Y-K, and Liu Y-J (2018) Cartoongan: generative adversarial networks for photo cartoonization. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 9465–9474
Zanero S, Savaresi SM (2004) Unsupervised learning techniques for an intrusion detection system. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, pp 412–419
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Montasari, R. (2022). Cyber Threats and National Security: The Use and Abuse of Artificial Intelligence. In: Masys, A.J. (eds) Handbook of Security Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91875-4_84
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91875-4_84
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91874-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91875-4
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics