Welcome
The workshop will focus on the application of AI to problems in cyber-security. Cyber systems generate large volumes of data, utilizing this effectively is beyond human capabilities. Additionally, adversaries continue to develop new attacks. Hence, AI methods are required to understand and protect the cyber domain. These challenges are widely studied in enterprise networks, but there are many gaps in research and practice as well as novel problems in other domains.
This year the AICS emphasis will be on practical considerations in the real world with a special focus on social attacks, that is, attacking the human in the loop to gain access to critical systems.
In general, AI techniques are still not widely adopted in many real world cyber security situations. There are many reasons for this including practical constraints (power, memory, etc.), lack of formal guarantees within a practical real world model, and lack of meaningful explanations. Moreover, in the face of improved automated systems security (better hardware security, better cryptographic solutions), cyber criminals have amplified their efforts with social attacks such as phishing attacks, spreading misinformation. These large-scale attacks are cheap and only need to succeed for a tiny fraction of all attempts to be effective. These lead to security considerations: (1) security of confidential data still uses classic access control, these must be augmented with human behavior considerations, (2) balancing privacy rights and data ownership concerns can lead to better control of sensitive data, (3) defending AI itself to deter automated attacks at scale, and (4) human behavior is difficult to model, thus, AI assistive techniques robust to human errors and susceptibility to manipulations can be very beneficial.