What Is It?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to creating a form of intelligence in computing, typically achieved by using training data to create a decision process using inputs and outputs. Its focus is to replicate human decision making and allow faster, more data focused decisions to be made.
Why Assess It?
There are many reasons to conduct an artificial intelligence security assessment, five of which are below.
Ratify Security Controls
Your AI system will have a number of security expectations, such as not disclosing sensitive data or being used in a malicious way for example. With a security assessment you can validate these expectations are being met.
Protect Intellectual Property
AI systems often deal with your organisations sensitive data and to be effective commonly feature your organisations business logic, making them a prime target for a threat actor. Through a security assessment you can both discover any risks your organisation faces with the AI system as well as ensure the system itself cannot be replicated by a competitor easily.
Validate Data Safety
AI requires large sets of real data to train on in comparison to conventional systems where pseudo-anonymised or test data can be utilised. This swathe of data is a valuable target for threat actor. It is important to both discover and mitigate any risks around its security, keeping you compliant with data processing laws.
Protect Reputation
No matter if your AI system is utilised as a decision aid or by users directly there is a latent risk of tarnishing your reputation as an organisation, whether that be by tricking the AI system into outputting clearly incorrect or offensive recommendations or simply by being able to be manipulated to achieve a sub-optimal action. A thorough security assessment can not only provide you confidence that your reputation is not at risk but provide assurance on other uses of the AI system.
Ongoing Security
Once an AI system has been deployed your organisation will maintain monitoring of it, ensuring that adverse security events are investigated and defence actions taken in the event of an attack. A security assessment ensures that you test these crucial capabilities in a safe environment, before your organisations security and reputation rely on it.
The Agility Cyber Approach
Like all our engagements, we want you to get the most out of your artificial intelligence security assessment and we do this by:
Threat Actor Simulation
Threat actors view your AI system very differently to how your organisation does. We ensure that we bring our working knowledge and experience of how threat actors work to the engagement. Some examples of this would be targeting the pipeline that feeds the AI system data, attempting to poison the source data, various data and model inferences, prompt injection attacks as well as larger objectives such as stealing the model as some examples.
Full Process Assessment
We believe that there is more to AI than the end service exposed to users or your organisation. We spend the time looking behind the scenes to ensure your architecture, deployment pipeline, data warehousing and supply amongst many other areas provide security for your solution.
Depth and Breadth
AI is rarely deployed in an isolated fashion. We evaluate the security posture of the underlying infrastructure in use including mapping out the dependency risks to third parties or other systems in your organisation.
Empower Governance
We want your AI system to work for you and part of that is ensuring that you have ongoing assurance over its role. We look to identify ways which your organisation can have oversight, governance and security insight into the AI system at every level.
Prioritised and Pragmatic Advice
We report what we find but we do not add issues to make the numbers up. We believe in identifying the patterns that affect your AI solution and helping you to fix their root cause, ensuring you get a higher return on investment from the assessment and from any remediation effort deployed by your teams.
Benefits of Partnering with Agility Cyber
Mutually Invested
Our experts work with you, not against you. There are no egotistical celebrations when a serious issue is discovered, just rapid full disclosure with pragmatic suggestions for effective remediation followed by ongoing support.
Clarity and Simplicity
We always provide clarity, believe in simplicity and value your time. An example is rather than waiting until the engagement starts, we will conduct open source intelligence gathering activities before the scoping meeting to help us understand your organisations position and risk posture thus enabling us to ask better questions, securing you higher value and saving you time.
Full Consultancy
Our team, based in the UK, is technically exceptional but we pair that with business sense to discover, triage and help you remediate the full range of security issues.
Impartiality
We are impartial, we do not sell you products or the latest buzzword laden trending solution.
Outstanding Service
We have an industry leading turnaround, agility is in our name after all. Proposals are shared with you within 24 hours of the scoping meeting. Accurate and complete daily debriefs are given during every engagement. The report is shared within 5 working days at the latest.