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Esa Origins 7 February 24 ~ 26, 2017
PROJECT An Origins Project Scientific Workshop
Challenges of Artificial Intelligence:
Envisioning and Addressing Adverse Outcomes
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
in the past with Chess and Go. Computer systems are initially inferior to their human counterparts but
quickly come to dominate the space.
The purpose of ACWs means they will be equipped with strategies for replication, persistence, and
stealth, all attributes that will make it hard to defend against them were they to “go rogue.” Because of
this concern, it is likely a good idea for designers to add built-in “kill switches”, lifetimes, or other
safety limitations. Figuring out how to effectively limit the actions of an ACW while maintaining its
usefulness is likely a very hard problem.
Current practices of cyber defense (especially against advanced threats) continue to be heavily reliant
on manual analysis, detection and risk mitigation. Unfortunately, human-driven analysis does not scale
well with the increasing speed and data amounts traversing modern networks. There is a growing
recognition that the future cyber defense should involve extensive use of autonomous agents that
actively patrol the friendly network, and detect and react to hostile activities rapidly (faster than
human reaction time), before the hostile malware can inflict major damage, or evade elimination, or
destroy the friendly agent. This requires cyber defense agents with a significant degree of intelligence,
autonomy, self-learning and adaptability. Autonomy, however, comes with difficult challenges of trust
and control by humans.
The scenario considers intelligent autonomous agents in both defensive and offensive cyber
operations. Their autonomous reasoning and cyber actions for prevention, detection and active
response to cyber threats will become critical enablers for both industry and military in protecting
large networks. Cyber weapons (e.g., malware) rapidly grow in their sophistication, and in their ability
to act autonomously and to adapt to specific conditions encountered in a system/network.
Agent’s self-preservation tactics are important for the continuous protection of networks, and if defeat
is inevitable the agent should self-destruct (i.e., corrupt itself and/or the system) to avoid being
compromised or tampered with by the adversary. Also, the notion of adversary must be defined and
distinguishable for the agent.
The system design and purpose is well intentioned — meant to reduce the load of human security
analysts and network operators, and speed up reaction times in cyber operations. The agent monitors
the systems in order to detect any adversarial activity, takes action autonomously, and reports back to
the central command unit regarding the incident and the action taken.
Since the agents are designed to be persistent, autonomous and learn, there are several implicit
problems that can arise:
e False reactions due to limited or misinformation — The agent has only a limited amount of
technical information that does not always correspond to what is happening in the human layer.
This can create false positives when trying to determine the adversary or adversarial activity. Since
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