The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) awarded 18 seed grants to nine Virginia public universities for a total of $1.61 million to address cybersecurity issues in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Through these funded projects, CCI researchers are advancing AI to improve security and privacy,” said Luiz DaSilva, CCI’s executive director. “They are also instrumental in fixing new vulnerabilities brought about by the widespread adoption of AI in our systems.”
Researchers are from Christopher Newport University, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia State University, Virginia Tech, and William & Mary. Funded by the state, CCI is making Virginia a global leader in cybersecurity and has more than 40 Virginia universities and colleges focused on workforce development, innovation, and research
Cybersecurity and AI
CCI researchers are using generative AI to increase the security of iris biometrics, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to analyze security vulnerabilities in software, and employing privacy-preserving learning for public health surveillance.
AI is routinely used to detect malicious activity. For example, credit card companies use AI to flag unusual purchases, and system administrators use it to identify known attacks and combat “zero day” exploits on computer systems.
The flip side is that malicious players also develop attacks that target AI systems, Da Silva said. Such attacks include data poisoning to manipulate data used to train an AI system so that it comes up with wrong outputs, or to create a backdoor that can be exploited for unauthorized access to information. AI can also be used to power ransomware attacks and social engineering attacks, through phishing that is increasingly sophisticated and targeted. And jailbreak attacks aim at bypassing security measures built around LLMs.
Funded projects in the Cybersecurity for AI and AI for Cybersecurity Program
- Adaptive Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks Using LLM-Driven Behavioral Analysis and Deep Reinforcement Learning, Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech
- AI-Powered Cyber Defense: Leveraging Transformer Models and eXplainable Reinforcement Learning Methods for Advanced Intrusion Detection and Response System, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Christopher Newport University
- Cyber-Attack Resilient Distributed and Explainable AI with Zero Trust Architecture, Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech
- Deepfake Detection by Leveraging Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks with Uncertainty Quantification, Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University
- Enhancing the Security of Large Language Models Against Persuasion-Based Jailbreak Attacks in Multi-Turn Dialogues, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia
- GenA(eye)ris: Generating Synthetic Iris Biometrics for Presentation Attack Security and Security for Generative Biometric Models, Virginia Tech, George Mason University
- Intelligent and Secure Wireless Sensor System for Monitoring Cattle on Farms, Virginia Tech, Virginia State University
- Knowledge-Enhanced Threat Detection with Large Language Models, Virginia Tech, University of Virginia
- Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Software Security Analysis and Malware Detection, William & Mary, George Mason University
- Meta-Architecture Binary Code Analysis: Multi-ISA Deep Learning Analysis Leveraging Single-ISA Data, George Mason University, Virginia Tech
- A Multitask LLM-Based Vulnerability Detector with Conversational Assistance, William & Mary, George Mason University
- Privacy-Preserving Federated loT Learning for Smart Public Health Surveillance, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Virginia
- Secure and Privacy-Conscious Threat Detection via Federated Learning and Graph Neural Networks, University of Virginia, George Mason University
- Study of Adversarial Attack Strategies on Autonomous Vehicles equipped with LiDAR Sensors, Christopher Newport University, Old Dominion University
- Threat Hunting System Enhancement by Generative AI and LLMs, George Mason University, Virginia Military Institute
- Toward Integrated Security and Privacy Solutions for Multi-Modal AI, Old Dominion University, William & Mary
- Towards a Knowledge-Guided Foundation Model for Long-Tail Anomaly Detection in Network Traffic, William & Mary, Virginia Tech
By Michele McDonald