It's a rare cybersecurity product these days that doesn't claim to have some form of AI capability. But exactly what benefits does AI deliver? And is there a risk of an arms race as threat actors also turn to the technology? We spoke to Corey Nachreiner, CSO at WatchGuard Technologies, to find out more about the role of AI in cybersecurity. BN: What role does AI play in cybersecurity?

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge (Song & Alves-Foss, 2015), a competition which invited participating finalist teams to develop automated cyber defense systems that can self-discover, prove, and correct software vulnerabilities at real-time - without human intervention. For the first time, the world witnessed hackers being automated at scale, i.e. cyber autonomy (Brumley, 2018). As the competition progressed, the systems were not only able to auto-detect and correct their software, but also able to attack other systems (other participants' machines) in the network. Even though the competition did not catch much mainstream media attention, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge proved the feasibility of cyber autonomy, stretched the imagination of the national and cyber security industries and created a mix of perceptions ranging from hope to fear - the hope of increasingly secure computing systems at scale, and the fear of current jobs such as penetration testing being automated.

The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light. Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows. On most days, two of them are spitting out a constant feed from a secretive program known as "Project IKE." The room looks no different than a standard government auditorium, but IKE represents a radical leap forward. If the Joint Operations Center is the physical embodiment of a new era in cyber warfare -- the art of using computer code to attack and defend targets ranging from tanks to email servers -- IKE is the brains. It tracks every keystroke made by the 200 fighters working on computers below the big screens and churns out predictions about the possibility of success on individual cyber missions. It can automatically run strings of programs and adjusts constantly as it absorbs information. IKE is a far cry from the prior decade of cyber operations, a period of manual combat that involved the most mundane of tools.

The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light. Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows. On most days, two of them are spitting out a constant feed from a secretive program known as "Project IKE." Join the Watchdog newsletter to hear about our latest ground-breaking investigation. The room looks no different than a standard government auditorium, but IKE represents a radical leap forward. If the Joint Operations Center is the physical embodiment of a new era in cyber warfare -- the art of using computer code to attack and defend targets ranging from tanks to email servers -- IKE is the brains. It tracks every keystroke made by the 200 fighters working on computers below the big screens and churns out predictions about the possibility of success on individual cyber missions. It can automatically run strings of programs and adjusts constantly as it absorbs information. IKE is a far cry from the prior decade of cyber operations, a period of manual combat that involved the most mundane of tools.

The makers of a supercomputer designed to automatically detect, patch and exploit existing software vulnerabilities were recently awarded a seven-figure contract from the Department of Defense to apply the cutting-edge technology to military systems, including US Navy ships and aircraft. ForAllSecure's patented technology from over a decade of research resulted in Mayhem (meaning Chaos), a fully autonomous cybersecurity system. At the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, the world's first all-machine hacking tournament, Mayhem was battle-tested and took first place in August 2016. Machines will never be as creative as humans, though, so ForAllSecure is also committed to HackCenter, a training platform designed to teach anyone the actionable skills needed to be effective in cybersecurity, as well as the delivery of in-person training events. Mayhem won first place and $2 million in the Cyber Grand Challenge.

There are a number of direct applications of AI relevant for national security purposes, both in the United States and elsewhere. Kevin Kelly notes that in the private sector "the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI."1 There is similarly a broad range of applications for AI in national security. Included below are some examples in cybersecurity, information security, economic and financial tools of statecraft, defense, intelligence, homeland security, diplomacy, and development. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of all possible uses of AI in these fields. Rather, these are merely intended as illustrative examples to help those in the national security community begin to think through some uses of this evolving technology.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is in the process of spinning up a new research program to develop ways to teach machines to learn while they are operating -- and apply their knowledge to new situations "the way biological systems do." The agency is now accepting research proposals for the program's first funding opportunity via a Broad Agency Announcement, published last week. Dubbed the Lifelong Learning Machines program or L2M, DARPA plans through the four-year program to fund the development of "substantially more capable systems that are continually improving and updating from experience." Artificial intelligence systems today can't adapt to situations for which they were not already trained or programmed, as DARPA notes in its Broad Agency Announcement released last week. And so applying AI systems for military uses in areas like "supply chain, logistics and visual recognition" is difficult to do today, because many of those applications involve details that aren't defined in advance, according to DARPA. When systems run into something they didn't see in training, they have to be taken offline and reprogrammed, DARPA says, a process that is "expensive and time-consuming," and potentially disruptive to a mission.

On a giant flat-screen TV in an old Emeryville, California warehouse, a floating orb fires red, blue, pink, and yellow beams into a honeycomb of hexagonal blocks. The blocks are black, white, and gray, but as the beams hit them, they change--flashing, fading, absorbing color. And when they do, scores tally just above. On the same screen, from adjacent windows, three commentators provide additional color, as if this was a videogame championship. "You can see who's being owned, and who's doing the owning," says one, a theoretical physicist named Hakeem Oluseyi. The other two commentators are veteran white-hat hackers, experts at reverse-engineering software in search of security holes.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence--a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity--could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.