Introduction
The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence into new industries with new stakeholders, coupled with an evolving threat landscape and huge growth in AI, presents tough challenges for security. The TC SAI creates high quality technical standards to combat these challenges.
Artificial Intelligence impacts our lives every day, from local AI systems on mobile phones suggesting the next word in our sentences to large manufacturers using AI to improve industrial processes. AI has the potential to revolutionize our interactions with technology, improve our quality of life and enrich security – but without high quality technical standards and good practices, AI has the potential to create new attacks and worsen existing security measures.
The ETSI Technical Committee on Securing Artificial Intelligence (TC SAI) has a key role to play in improving the security of AI through production of high-quality technical standards; the TC SAI will create standards to preserve and improve the security of new AI technologies.
Role & Activities
TC SAI addresses 4 main aspects of AI security standardisation:
1. Securing AI from attack e.g. where AI is a component in the system that needs defending.
2. Mitigating against AI e.g. where AI is the 'problem' (or used to improve and enhance other more conventional attack vectors).
3. Using AI to enhance security measures against attack from other things e.g. AI is part of the ‘solution’ (or used to improve and enhance more conventional countermeasures).
4. Societal security and safety aspects of the use and application of AI.
The ETSI TC SAI develops the technical knowledge that acts as a baseline in ensuring that artificial intelligence is secure. Stakeholders impacted by the activity of ETSI’s group include end users, manufacturers, operators and governments.
Standards
A full list of related standards in the public domain is accessible via the TC SAI committee page.
Future work
Although the phrase was coined in the 1950s, practical AI systems have only really been implemented in recent years, driven by:
- Evolution of advanced AI techniques including neural networks, deep learning
- Availability of significant data sets to enable robust training
- Advances in high performance computing enabling highly performing devices and the availability of hyperscale performance through cloud services
These new techniques and capabilities, together with the availability of data and compute resources, mean that AI systems will only become more prevalent. However, this results in a series of challenges both old and new. See below for a list of potential future topics for the TC SAI.
- Data security, integrity and privacy
- Training data: quality, quantity, confidentiality and labelling
- Transferability (re-use of models across tasks and industries)
- Misuse
- Bias and unintended consequences
- Data Processing / Machine Learning Life Cycle
- AI to AI communication
- AI retraining
TC SAI will consider how its own activities can contribute to the development of future EU Harmonised Standards under the EU AI Act.
Find out more
For more on ETSI's general security work, check out the cyber security page on our website.
If you are interested in joining ETSI, including TC SAI, please refer to membership information and contacts on the SAI committee page.