Artificial Intelligence will struggle to master a complex domain like security: Amit Yoran, President, RSA

In his opening keynote at the RSA Conference 2016, Amit Yoran, President, RSA, said that the industry has to tackle the threat of cyber threats from a different perspective. Rather than looking at focusing solely on compliance, Yoran said that industry professionals must go beyond the basics and try to track hackers.

While Artificial Intelligence is making impressive strides, Yoran explained why artificial intelligence solutions will struggle to master a complex topic like security. He cited the example of Google which recently announced that AlphaGo (Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm), which combines advanced tree search with deep neural network systems has been able to definitively beat (5 games to 0) the reigning three-time European champion of China’s ancient game of Go. While this was impressive, Yoran pointed out that information security was different.

“Games like Go take place in a finite universe (a Go board), with extremely well-defined boundaries (the rules of the game). And most critically, all players – human and machine – must follow a constant and well defined set of unchanging rules. That’s pretty much the case for all successful applications of AI technologies: knowable, static rules that can be modelled for relevant lengths of time, with everyone playing by those rules. Thinking about the “game” of cybersecurity, our opponent isn’t playing the same game and certainly isn’t following the same rules. In fact, our opponents don’t really have rules. So in real life, who is sitting across from us at our game board? If we could unveil our opponents we would likely see incredibly creative human beings who are changing the rules as they play.”

Yoran said that the security challenge is not a technology one. “Our adversaries aren’t beating us because they have better technology. They’re beating us because they are being more creative and patient and persistent. They have a target – no prescribed path to get there, no overarching rules, just a target – and a virtually limitless number of pathways to explore.” The only way to keep pace is to leverage skills and create a team of curious problem solving analysts, said Yoran.