Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken our world by storm. We constantly stand in awe as we adjust to our new normal with AI and its integration within the fabric of our society. Our developers are in a constant state of fight or flight as it pertains to trying to create the latest and greatest AI application to address one of the many issues across multiple industries. But just with any industry or new technology, the innovation of AI has surpassed the security controls that are necessary to regulate and provide protection against malicious attacks and gaps in security. It does not help that developers from multiple organizations are being pushed to create solutions first and think about security last in order to meet project deadlines.

AI Security Forecasting:

When attempting to peek into the future as it pertains to technology it’s easy to see what is on the horizon by observing trends and identifying patterns. As it pertains to Artificial Intelligence, if you” follow the developers” you will find where the market is headed. One key observation is the effect of Open AI as a company and the impressive models that are published that seem to captivate the main audience of the AI community. With their partnership with Microsoft the two companies have accomplished so much in such a short time. It’s almost as if the collaboration between the two companies gives the same euphoria we experienced when Apple released their first model of iPhone to the world.

It’s safe to say that Azure Open AI & Open AI are the market leaders from both a marketing perspective and performance perspective. Thus, it’s imperative to ensure that as an organization you have the resources either internally or through a 3rd party to ensure that the proper security controls are in place for solutions built using the LLM leaders within the AI community such as Llama, GPT-4o, Gemini etc.

We see the security associated with AI whether GEN AI or LLM’s as a layered approach that consists of the following tiers

• Secure infrastructure
• Compliance
• Governance
  • Security Controls Enforcement
• Risk Assessments
• Manual Security Testing
• Personnel
• Systematic Security Testing
• AI Inventory
• Training

Organizations should take note of the above list and position themselves to have the proper resources in place to ensure that solutions are developed with security included from the very beginning. Implementing AI within an application (depending on how it’s deployed and what technologies are leveraged) can create different types of threats within an organization. As a result, it’s imperative that an organization prepare and execute a plan to ensure that AI security controls are enforced. This includes implementing secure infrastructure via Infrastructure as Code, all the way down to performing red teaming activities for AI solutions.

Now is the time for security teams within organizations to take heed to the top performing LLM models and platforms. Assess what type of models and solutions your organization is looking to implement and ensure that either you have the right personnel/controls to address the security concerns with integration or you have obtained a 3rd party partner to assist with your AI security posture.

The scary part from what we are seeing in the field is that some organizations have already developed solutions prior to implementing the proper security controls or due diligence to ensure that their MVP or AI solutions were secure before deploying to production. On the other hand, due to recent AI attacks, we are now seeing organizations start to take AI security seriously. Organizations are beginning to have the right conversations and assessments from 3rd party consulting firms that have the expertise to assist.

AI is here, and it’s making such an amazing impact on our society as it stands in the center of growth and evolution for multiple industries. It’s important that we focus both on the growth of the technology from a developmental perspective and use security best practices to allow our developers to enhance this technology in a secure way. The responsibility of continuing to develop secure innovative solutions that leverage AI lies on the shoulders of its creators, and our ability to develop the proper security frameworks, security tools, and AI security platforms to adequately secure solutions that leverage AI.