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Arin Barde

Arin Barde is a senior (12th) at Eastlake High School. Arin enjoys experimenting with AI through any model he can find on HuggingFace. He is the AI go-to-resource and handyman for his dad, an IIT Bombay alum, who works on automating security with AI. Arin lives in Seattle. He loves reading, programming, and debating philosophy.

2024Current IssueCybersecurityVol2_2024

How AI impacts Cybersecurity

by Sumedh Barde & Arin Barde
by Sumedh Barde & Arin Barde

In Feb 2024, a finance manager Ravi (name anonymized) received a message from his CFO. The message said their company needed to make a secret payment, and asked Ravi to join a video call to discuss details. Ravi was initially suspicious. But, he put aside his early doubts when he joined the video call and saw his CFO and other colleagues on the call. He followed the CFO’s ask and authorized a payment of $25 million to the account provided.

It turns out that all the faces and voices on the video call were AI-generated deepfakes. This is a real incident from Hong Kong.

We live in interesting times. AI is having a wide-ranging impact on the planet, both good and bad. It enables amazing new use cases. It is displacing jobs. But most importantly it is challenging the foundational element that made society possible – trust. This article covers one slice of that topic, AI’s impact on cybersecurity

Artificial Intelligence 101

ChatGPT has caught the world’s fancy in the last two years. There is much more to AI than ChatGPT. Here is a quick flyby, enough to appear informed at a social event!

Artificial Intelligence refers to the ability of a computer to perform tasks “commonly associated” with humans. There are, broadly speaking, two ways in which AI may be applied.

  • Predictive AI is used when the goal is to pick the best choice (according to a given scoring method) from a pre-determined range of choices. Examples: Deepblue from IBM beat then-champion Garry Kasparov, using predictive AI that could analyze 200 million moves in one second to pick the best move. A self-driving car picks which way and how much to steer based on what it senses in the environment. Netflix recommends the shows you are most likely to enjoy. Google, Meta, and Bing rank the ads most relevant to you.

  • Generative AI is used when the goal is to generate new content. Large Language Models (LLMs) are the most popular cases for Generative AI. They are designed to generate text. ChatGPT is the most famous application for LLMs.

The way AI systems learn has greatly evolved. In the early days, humans programmed the system based on their knowledge. In the 1990s, machine learning picked up. In this approach, you first train an AI system by feeding it large amounts of input-output pairs and letting it find patterns. Once trained, the AI system, aka model, can predict the output for any new inputs you give it. Deep learning builds on this by using multiple layers of such a system. All well-known AI systems today learn via deep learning.

Fun fact: Machine learning and deep learning use Linear Algebra, which every student at IITB learns in the first year.

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