The Beautiful Lies of Machine Learning in Security

Contrary to what you may have read, machine learning (ML) isn't magic pixie dust. In general, ML is good for narrowly scoped problems with huge datasets available, and where the patterns of interest are highly repeatable or predictable. Most security problems neither require nor benefit from ML. Many experts, including the folks at Google, suggest that when solving a complex problem you should exhaust all other approaches before trying ML. ML is a broad collection of statistical techniques that allows us to train a computer to estimate an answer to a question even when we haven't explicitly coded the correct answer.