Hacking Things That Think

Ground Truth, Wed, Aug 7, 13:30 - Wed, Aug 7, 14:15 CDT The rush to embed AI into everything is quickly opening up unanticipated attack surfaces. Manipulating natural language systems using prompt injection and related techniques feels eerily simila...

Ground Truth, Wed, Aug 7, 13:30 - Wed, Aug 7, 14:15 CDT

The rush to embed AI into everything is quickly opening up unanticipated attack surfaces. Manipulating natural language systems using prompt injection and related techniques feels eerily similar to socially engineering humans. Are these similarities only superficial, or is there something deeper at play? The Cognitive Attack Taxonomy (CAT) is a continuously expanding catalog of over 350 cognitive vulnerabilities, exploits, and TTPs which have been applied to humans, AI, and non-human biological entities.

Examples of attacks in the CAT include linguistic techniques used in social engineering attacks to prompt a response, disabling autonomous vehicles with video projection, using compromised websites to induce negative neurophysiological effects, manipulating large language models to expose sensitive files or deploy natively generated malware, disrupting the power grid using coupons, and many other examples.

The CAT offers the opportunity to create on demand cognitive attack graphs and kill chains for nearly any target. This talk concludes with a brief demo integrating cognitive attack graphs into a purpose-built ensemble AI model capable of autonomously assessing a target's vulnerabilities, identifying an exploit, selecting TTPs, and finally launching a simulated attack on that target. The CAT will be made publicly available at the time of this presentation.

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Matthew Canham