Role and Efficacy of Artificial Intelligence in Cyber-security

Abstract

The internet is growing and so is the cyber world, more and more people, companies, organizations and governments, etc., who were previously ignorant or just didn’t want to enter the digital world have now started to reap its benefits as technology advances and provides more solutions to the existing real-world problems. This has unfortunately also increased the number of attackers, whether they may be cybercriminals, hacktivists, sponsored attackers or an insider of the organization. Whatever may be the motive of these attackers, malicious or not, but attacks such as data breaches, identity theft, malware attacks, phishing, social engineering, network intrusion and what not, have become extensively common and are causing millions of dollars’ worth loss to various companies each year. This number has increased each year despite of all the traditional security mechanisms in places such as firewalls, traditional ids, etc. It’s possible that this is due to the fact that the attackers have become quite intelligent and well versed with their techniques over time, but at the same time, this also highlights a critical flaw in the traditional cyber security implementation, and that is the lack of intelligence and dynamism. Attackers use this to their advantage to circumvent any defence mechanism in place as these mechanisms are dumb and would only ever complain if any rule enlisted within them is violated for example. This is where artificial intelligence becomes important, an emerging field that shows promise in enabling intelligent cyber security solutions that can counter the modern and sophisticated cyber attackers. In this article various artificial intelligence methods that can be leveraged to design powerful and dynamic solutions for cyber security along with major limitations and challenges faced.