Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Chaulagain, Amul


Agentic AI and the Cyber Arms Race

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract---Agentic AI is shifting the cybersecurity landscape as attackers and defenders leverage AI agents to augment humans and automate common tasks. In this article, we examine the implications for cyber warfare and global politics as Agentic AI becomes more powerful and enables the broad proliferation of capabilities only available to the most well resourced actors today . As attacks increased in volume and attackers became more sophisticated, moving towards polymorphic malware, packers, and novel evasion techniques, defenders looked to machine learning to provide scalability (quickly analyze large volumes of data and automate repetitive tasks), pattern recognition (detect common attack patterns), and novelty detection (recognize abnormal behaviors that may indicate malicious actors or insider threats). Companies now use Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide analysts and reverse engineers with a rapid analysis of malicious code and best next steps when triaging alerts. But the real paradigm shift in cybersecurity for both attackers and defenders is still on the horizon: agentic artificial intelligence (agentic AI).


On the Abuse and Detection of Polyglot Files

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A polyglot is a file that is valid in two or more formats. Polyglot files pose a problem for malware detection systems that route files to format-specific detectors/signatures, as well as file upload and sanitization tools. In this work we found that existing file-format and embedded-file detection tools, even those developed specifically for polyglot files, fail to reliably detect polyglot files used in the wild, leaving organizations vulnerable to attack. To address this issue, we studied the use of polyglot files by malicious actors in the wild, finding $30$ polyglot samples and $15$ attack chains that leveraged polyglot files. In this report, we highlight two well-known APTs whose cyber attack chains relied on polyglot files to bypass detection mechanisms. Using knowledge from our survey of polyglot usage in the wild -- the first of its kind -- we created a novel data set based on adversary techniques. We then trained a machine learning detection solution, PolyConv, using this data set. PolyConv achieves a precision-recall area-under-curve score of $0.999$ with an F1 score of $99.20$% for polyglot detection and $99.47$% for file-format identification, significantly outperforming all other tools tested. We developed a content disarmament and reconstruction tool, ImSan, that successfully sanitized $100$% of the tested image-based polyglots, which were the most common type found via the survey. Our work provides concrete tools and suggestions to enable defenders to better defend themselves against polyglot files, as well as directions for future work to create more robust file specifications and methods of disarmament.


The Path To Autonomous Cyber Defense

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract---Defenders are overwhelmed by the number and scale of attacks against their networks.This problem will only be exacerbated as attackers leverage artificial intelligence to automate their workflows. We propose a path to autonomous cyber agents able to augment defenders by automating critical steps in the cyber defense life cycle. To avoid being overwhelmed, and complexity. The deep neural nets in order to generalize well across creation of autonomous cyber defense agents is one states. By leveraging deep RL, DeepMind has trained promising approach to automate operations and prevent reinforcement learning algorithms to defeat expert human cyber defenders from being overwhelmed.