West Lafayette, Indiana — Malware. Ransomware. Zero-day exploit. There is no rest when it comes to protecting against cyberattacks. And in an increasingly connected world, with the expansion of cyberspace and cyber-physical space, and access to tools such as artificial intelligence, attacks are likely to become more diverse and sophisticated.
That’s why a group of the nation’s best computer scientists and engineers, including researchers from Purdue University, came together to Sponsored by the National Science Foundation Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION). This $20 million five-year project is one of seven newly funded National Artificial Intelligence Labs. ACTION brings AI continuous learning (and now reasoning) to the constant situational awareness and action that is fundamental to cybersecurity.
“AI is now routinely used for things like malware analysis to identify malicious documents and malicious web pages. Giovanni Vigna, lead the project. “What we don’t have are entities that can be inferred. This is an opportunity to combine artificial intelligence and security in novel ways.”
“The National AI Lab is a key component of our country’s AI innovation, infrastructure, technology, education and partnership ecosystem,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “These laboratories are driving discoveries that will ensure our country is at the forefront of the global AI revolution.”
Su Dong YangSamuel Conte Professor of Computer Science, CeliasThe Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security is a Principal Investigator at Purdue University and a leader in research inspired by the use of the ACTION Institute. He and his five other Purdue faculty members- Elisa Bertino, Z. Barkey Cherick, Li Ning Hoi, Yunshan Lu and Ming Ying – Join ACTION collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara. University of California, Berkeley; Georgia Tech; University of Chicago; University of Washington; University of Illinois at Chicago;
Purdue University serves as one of ACTION’s premier hubs for research, education, workforce development, and technology transfer, leveraging CERIAS programs and initiatives to reach faculty and students, as well as industry and government. partners are also involved. The Purdue team offers expertise in key areas such as cyber-physical security. Discovery, integration and reasoning of cyber-physical knowledge. and Human-AI agent collaboration across the end-to-end cyber defense lifecycle.
“Purdue University is pleased to be involved with the newly formed NSF AI Institute, where a team of cybersecurity and AI experts will focus on this important and rapidly evolving field. We will work together to make breakthrough progress.” Director of Research. “We are thrilled to be part of this groundbreaking effort, and with the recent announcement of the Purdue Computes initiative, the timing could not have been better.”
Security-inspired AI and AI-powered security
Possible scenarios are: Cybercriminals have access to software used in fictional smart cities, municipalities where water and distribution infrastructure is automated and integrated. They introduce software vulnerabilities that are too complex and too avoidable to raise cyber or physical alarms. From there, they use this vulnerability to carry out supply chain attacks, gradually compromising parts of cyber-physical systems in ways that look like glitches or anomalous connections, but which threat detection systems can identify. Nothing is trained to be. Eventually, they gain access to a control system that can cut off water and power, effectively paralyzing the city. All of this is done by seemingly trivial actions over encrypted connections that go unnoticed by intrusion detection systems.
Not a completely hypothetical situation. In fact, his campaign of similar hacks was orchestrated in his 2021, compromising the vendor’s SolarWinds-created application monitoring software to compromise several US government agencies. According to researchers, this kind of attack is why we need a more sophisticated type of AI-powered cybersecurity.
“There is this notion of an AI ‘stack,’” says Vigna. “Imagine multiple layers of functionality that support AI in many ways: reasoning, learning, strategic planning, human-AI interaction, and more.” Instead, it enables the creation of autonomous, intelligent “agents” that can identify attackers, initiate response, and perform remediation.
ACTION collaborators begin by conducting research along four main objectives: domain knowledge learning and reasoning, human-agent interaction, multi-agent collaboration, and strategic game and tactical planning. The thrust of these studies extracts semantics in potentially adversarial and combative scenarios, facilitating reasoning and reasoning, while serving as a knowledge base that can grow to handle large datasets. .
AI research, meanwhile, informs and inspires the end-to-end cyber defense lifecycle. ACTION collaborators develop and customize intelligent agents powered by an AI stack to perform the four main parts of the cyber defense lifecycle: threat and vulnerability assessment, attack detection, attack identification, and attack response and recovery. perform tasks. While performing these tasks, agents acquire new knowledge and experience, increasing their effectiveness and efficiency over time.
“Today, any system with cyber components such as processors and sensors can face cybersecurity threats,” said Xu. “An adversary can investigate, infiltrate, and attack in seconds. His ACTION intelligent his agent approach to next-generation cybersecurity has shown promise for outsmarting, speeding, and outsmarting adversaries.” provide an opportunity.”
In addition to developing next-generation AI and cybersecurity technologies, ACTION is committed to outreach to underrepresented communities and building a “cybersecurity + AI” talent pipeline.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a leading public research institution developing practical solutions to today’s toughest challenges. Ranked the 10th most innovative university in the United States by US News & World Report for the past five years, Purdue University offers world-changing research and otherworldly discoveries. Committed to hands-on and online real-world learning, Purdue brings innovative education to everyone. Purdue University, which is committed to affordability and accessibility, has frozen tuition and most fees at she level in 2012-13, allowing more students. You can graduate debt-free more than ever before. See how Purdue is relentlessly chasing the next big leap.https://stories.purdue.edu
Media Contact: Liana Wisniewski rmwisnie@purdue.edu
sauce: Su Dongyang, dxu@purdue.edu
