Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Zero Trust

Change happens whether or not we are ready for it!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology that is introducing disruptive effects across business, technology, security, and society. This technology has been evolving for some time but recently shifted into high gear with the availability of a new generation of generative AI technology.

This chapter provides a summary of AI and its impacts, limitations, and relationship with Zero Trust. Detailed guidance on AI and security for each role is included in each playbook.

This chapter answers these important questions:

• What is AI?
• What will the impact of AI look like?
• What are the limitations of AI?
• How can we manage AI security risks with Zero Trust?
• How will AI impact Zero Trust?

Let’s start with the first basic question regarding what AI is.

What is AI?

AI is the simulation of intelligent human behavior using computers. There are many focus areas within AI, so this book will only provide a brief summary of AI and its implications for security and Zero Trust.

It’s important to distinguish between two different types of AI capabilities:

• Classic AI: The role of AI in security began by capturing and scaling expert human experience over large datasets with machine learning (ML). This takes the form of human experts training and tuning supervised ML models ahead of time and having unsupervised ML models identify clusters or patterns in the data that they surface to human experts for analysis. ML enables humans to identify patterns and anomalies in large amounts of data that can be used to identify security weaknesses, attacks, and other insights in the large complex technical estates of a modern organization.
• Generative AI: Recently, large language models (LLM) have enabled the analysis and generation of...

What will the impact of AI look like?

The impact of AI will be significant and will be difficult to predict in detail, but clear themes are emerging on the kind of impact it will have on organizations.

Generative AI allows anyone with access to the internet to generate impressive content with very little training. People can use generative AI to produce photo-realistic pictures, drawings, articles, song lyrics, poems, computer code, and much more simply by requesting it in a simple chat interface.

AI will have a large, fast, and ongoing impact across every organization because of the ease of use and wide availability of this powerful technology. The disruptive impact of AI will likely resemble the PC and internet revolutions that transformed business processes, the consumer economy, and many aspects of society.

AI adoption will be fast

Unlike the PC revolution, AI does not require distributing new devices to have a broad and deep impact across society. This generation of...

What are the limitations of AI?

AI technology will be powerful and transformative, but AI is not a magic silver bullet solution for security or any other problems. AI has very real and significant limitations, and it is far from the fully independent human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI) we frequently see portrayed in movies and TV shows.

The main limitation is that AI models don’t truly understand content in the complex and rich ways that humans do. AI will also naturally reflect and propagate any biases in its data, whether or not these biases are known and documented.

Let’s take a quick look at these key limitations of AI.

AI models do not “understand” anything

While generative AI appears to “understand” things on the surface, it is only imitating the original content it was trained on. This extremely shallow “understanding” is similar to fake buildings (façades) on a Western movie set – these...

How can Zero Trust help manage AI security risk?

A Zero Trust approach is required to effectively manage security risks related to AI. Classic network perimeter-centric approaches are built on more than 20-year-old assumptions of a static technology environment and are not agile enough to keep up with the rapidly evolving security requirements of AI.

The following key elements of Zero Trust security enable you to manage AI risk:

• Data centricity: AI has dramatically elevated the importance of data security and AI requires a data-centric approach that can secure data throughout its life cycle in any location.

  Zero Trust provides this data-centric approach and the playbooks in this series guide the roles in your organizations through this implementation.

• Coordinated management of continuous dynamic risk: Like modern cybersecurity attacks, AI continuously disrupts core assumptions of business, technical, and security processes. This requires coordinated management of a complex...

How will AI impact Zero Trust?

AI will accelerate many aspects of Zero Trust because it dramatically improves the security tooling and people’s ability to use it. AI promises to reduce the burden and effort for important but tedious security tasks such as the following:

• Helping security analysts quickly query many data sources (without becoming an expert in query languages or tool interfaces)
• Helping writing incident response reports
• Identifying common follow-up actions to prevent repeat incident

Simplifying the interface between people and the complex systems they need to use for security will enable people with a broad range of skills to be more productive. Highly skilled people will be able to do more of what they are best at without repetitive and distracting tasks. People earlier in their careers will be able to quickly become more productive in a role, perform tasks at an expert level more quickly, and help them learn by answering questions and providing...

Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed what AI is, its impact, the limitations of current AI technology, how to manage AI with Zero Trust, and how AI will affect Zero Trust.

In the next chapter – Chapter 6, How to Scope, Size, and Start Zero Trust – we’ll talk about agile security and answer the most common questions around scoping, sizing, and starting Zero Trust.