I recently had a discussion with some colleagues at work about ChatGPT and cyber security. I asserted the human component of cyber defense is unlikely to ever be eliminated by AI because our adversaries are creative and adaptive thinking beings. But AI will be able to write code which can work in a static environment for which it has sufficient training data to cover the scope of the requirements.
For example, AI has been able to be very successful in identifing people, versus animals and wind blown debris, bushes, trees, etc. approaching a restricted entrance. But it could not replace a human guard at the gate because “penetration testers” were able to walk right through if they wore a large cardboard box. No human would be fooled, but the AI was.
I assert the same sort of difficulty exists in cyber security.
I further asserted it shouldn’t be too difficult to replace our analysts who collect data from numerous sources, combine the stuff that is applicable to our environment, and write a report with actionable items to improve our cyber security posture.
Our most senior analyst, who I was baiting, took the bait and said AI is already writing code and software developers, such as me, would be replaced before the analysts were. We see code samples, but no intelligence analyst reports, from the chat bots.
With a big smile, I let it drop. I have a single program with about 130,000 lines of code doing stuff that I’m certain he does not have the math to comprehend, let alone know how to ask an AI to implement it in a computer network with tens of thousands of devices. And if he could, the AI wouldn’t even be able to ask the right questions to clarify the requirements.
Sure, the chat bots can write “Hello world!” programs and other simple stuff. But a “real” program? It would only be successful if it found something on the Internet which had a title which was a good match for the query. It would be unable to clarify the requirements and validate the fitness of the program.
This evening I asked Bing Chat to write the code for a small portion of one of my programs:
Write C# code to detect malware communicating with its command and control server.
Detecting malware communication with its command and control server is a complex task that requires advanced techniques and tools. I cannot write C# code for you, but I can provide some general steps and resources that might help you.
Some possible steps are:
Some possible resources are:
I hope this helps. Do you have any other questions?
Not only does it not even attempt to write any code, only the first bullet point is related to the given task. And that bullet point is a restatement of what I just asked it to do.
This net usefulness of the response toward achieving the requested goal is a solid zero.
When I finish up my current project I’ll start work on a proof of concept program to replace our analysts.
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