As Microsoft places an increasing focus on cybersecurity in the wake of an ever-growing number of sophisticated attacks, the company is working on solutions to shore up its services. As we move into an era of innovative tech driven by artificial intelligence, protecting AI is becoming vital. With that in mind, Microsoft is launching a new tool called Counterfit.
Counterfit is a new open source solution that Microsoft will use to automate security tests across AI systems. Organizations can leverage the tool to gain security insights and protections across artificial intelligence services.
Microsoft says the project was born from customer feedback. Specifically, the company surveyed 28 organizations and found 25 believed their AI security was not robust enough. They wanted more tools to help their IT admins better secure AI systems.
In a blog post announcing Counterfit, Microsoft explains how it already uses the tool to automate AI security internally:
“Today, we routinely use Counterfit as part of our AI red team operations. We have found it helpful to automate techniques in MITRE's Adversarial ML Threat Matrix and replay them against Microsoft's own production AI services to proactively scan for AI-specific vulnerabilities. Counterfit is also being piloted in the AI development phase to catch vulnerabilities in AI systems before they hit production.”
Benefits
While Microsoft Counterfit has several benefits, it rests on three core flexible goals:
- “Counterfit is environment agnostic—it can help assess AI models hosted in any cloud environment, on-premises, or on the edge.
- Counterfit is model agnostic—the tool abstracts the internal workings of their AI models so that security professionals can focus on security assessment.
- Counterfit strives to be data agnostic—it works on AI models using text, images, or generic input.”
Built to be rollout ready, Microsoft says the new tool is easy to use for IT teams who have Metasploit or PowerShell Empyre. If you want to know more about Counterfit and how to deploy is across an organization, check out the official GitHub page here.
Tip of the day:
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