Artificial intelligence and the offense–defense balance in cyber security

AI and the offense-defense balance 65 valid in the mid-/long term, but at the same time, it will take stock of the contemporary knowledge about when, how, and to what extent AI and cyber security are converging.A first subsection defines artificial intelligence -then, the chapter introduces recent AI initiatives in the private sector and on the state level.A third subsection moves on to outline the uncertainties of the innovation process, the underlying difficulty to predict the future of AI in cyber security.However, some statements about the future of AI and cyber security are possible.In its subsequent sections, this chapter identifies several trends through the study of selected scientific and technical literature discussing the present -both embryonic and more mature -applications of AI-based solutions, which -from a technical point of view -promise to affect cyber security in the coming few years.The chapter acknowledges that the governance of AI innovation, in general, and with regard to cyber security, in particular, is still at its infancy and fragmented.The governance models that have been emerging so far will develop further under the pressure of the forces which are displayed by the actors mentioned earlier, and their mutual power relations.More initiatives are therefore to be expected; their effects will have to be assessed.At the moment, it seems that the impact of AI innovation on cyber security is still relatively more driven by the achieved, and yet to be achieved but possible, technological advancements than by emerging standards or regulations.However, there are some early and promising applications of AI to cyber security which allow the making of an informed, although general, guess on what to expect in the near-term future.In particular, they allow to speculate on how the cyber security landscape might look like within the next 3-5 years.AI will enrich the cyber threat landscape -both in quantitative and qualitative terms.It will likely increase the number of cyber threat actors, offer them additional exploitable vulnerabilities and targets, as well as boost their malevolent actions.Conversely, AI will serve the defense from those threats by enabling the discovering of unknown vulnerabilities, the detection of malicious cyber activities, the implementation of countermeasures, and by augmenting the shortage of human professionals available to address imminent challenges.Simply put, artificial intelligence will integrate and support cyber defensive and offensive activities, which may involve both the logical and the semantic layers of the cyberspace.Most of the features and functionalities which make artificial intelligence appropriate to cyber defense also make it suitable to offense.This is for example the case of the employment of AI to produce targeted cyber intelligence, which can be consumed for both protective and aggressive purposes.It is difficult to establish which application, defensive or offensive, will benefit relatively more from the integration of AI capabilities.It will depend on the capacity of single cyber security stakeholders (governmental or private) to master AI and leverage it for their intended purposes.It will also depend on their overall capacity to identify, understand, and address the risks, threats, and opportunities stemming from the integration of these technologies into cyber defensive or offensive systems.