Latest / The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast / Why Security Intelligence Fails Before the Attack - Assaf Kipnis (EP 23)
Transcript
- 0:14Hello, this is Eva, and you're listening to the In Between Tech
- 0:18and Trust podcast. In this week's episode, we dive
- 0:21deep into all aspects around threat intelligence.
- 0:25And for that important topic, I have Asaf kidneys with me in
- 0:29conversation. And Asaf comes with over 10
- 0:33years of experience in that industry.
- 0:35He has worked for some of the major tech companies, for
- 0:39example, Meta or LinkedIn. And currently he's building his
- 0:43own platform because he's convinced that data provenance
- 0:47is one of the most important aspects to provide and help us
- 0:52engaging with the future. And so together we look at the
- 0:55intersection of technology and trust from a threat Intel
- 1:00perspective and also from a defense perspective.
- 1:03We talk a lot about what it actually means to avoid threats
- 1:08and also counter them, of how the operations behind it really
- 1:12work and what in times of becomes most important To then
- 1:16also dive deep into the actual happenings of attacks and what
- 1:21happens behind the scenes. And also how to, you know,
- 1:24leverage the knowledge behind it.
- 1:26And we do discuss of why understanding your product and
- 1:32your platform is the most important aspect for you to
- 1:37enable security and also to avoid threats going forward.
- 1:44Welcome Asaf and happy to have you on the In Between Tech and
- 1:48Trust podcast all. Right.
- 1:49Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
- 1:52For the listeners that don't know you, do you briefly just
- 1:55want to say a bit about your background and also with what
- 1:58perspective on tech and trust you come into the conversation?
- 2:01Sure. So my name is Asaf Kipnis.
- 2:03I've been in, let's call it the tech space for over 12 years
- 2:10now. I've been in information
- 2:12security and threat intelligence integrity spanning LinkedIn,
- 2:17Google, Meta 11 Labs for a little while and I've been
- 2:20mostly working on the investigation space and the
- 2:24threat intelligence space within Infosec and Integrity, trust and
- 2:29safety. What were underlying challenges
- 2:32that you keep identifying over and over again?
- 2:35And it doesn't need to be dependent on the tech company.
- 2:38On the contrary, is there anything that was particularly
- 2:41visible for you in the tech space and also in the background
- 2:44that you worked out? I think the main thing that I've
- 2:46noticed throughout my career, and This is why I decided to go
- 2:51build something on my own, is there's a big focus in, and this
- 2:55is more in this security and safety and threat Intel space.
- 2:59There's a big focus on dealing with the problem that's right in
- 3:03front of our faces and dealing with the manifestation of that
- 3:06problem. And what that causes is that we
- 3:10end up dealing with the same problems over and over and over
- 3:13again. And you can see that the
- 3:15industry is very much on a reactive kind of work.
- 3:20And a lot of the work that it's done is, is not learning from
- 3:24what we what we identified. There's a big lack of kind of
- 3:28gap and learning as we continuously fight fires to find
- 3:31the next shiny thing that is in front of us.
- 3:35And why do you think is that so? I think there's multiple reasons
- 3:38for that. I think the most kind of like
- 3:41structural reason is that it's very hard to measure what you
- 3:46didn't, what didn't happen. Riding in on a White Horse and
- 3:49saving everybody from a fire that looks really good, that
- 3:52measures really well. You can say we took down X
- 3:55amount of actors or we stopped an attack.
- 3:59And so if you want to keep your team working and viable in the
- 4:02company, you need to show something.
- 4:04The other issue there is that I think the learning piece falls
- 4:10between teams. Usually you'll have the team
- 4:13that's actually doing the prevention or the detection.
- 4:16You'll have the teams that are doing the analysis and the
- 4:18finding and it's, it's very hard to connect between those two
- 4:24teams. So a thing I've been thinking
- 4:25about is how threat intelligence and Intel in general is not
- 4:30incorporated into those spaces into safety and, and, and
- 4:33security. It's more kind of like adjacent
- 4:36and feeds the information when needed.
- 4:39But there isn't a clear structure that controls the kind
- 4:43of inflow or the influx of information from threat
- 4:47intelligence into actual detection.
- 4:49Over the years, can you to describe a bit of how threat
- 4:52intelligence has potentially also changed and how systems
- 4:57have also evolved over time to acknowledge potential blind
- 5:02spots that they have or might not have?
- 5:04So I think the way threat intelligence has changed is in a
- 5:09good way and a bad way. So in a good way, I think threat
- 5:12intelligence have become more front and center when when we're
- 5:17working on complex actors and we want to try to understand how
- 5:21actors are operating. So threat intelligence is taking
- 5:24more of a kind of front of the house area.
- 5:27On the flip side of of that, some companies have are using
- 5:31threat intelligence just to identify new upcoming fires and
- 5:35kind of and threat intelligence just stays in the point where
- 5:38they're not telling you how to prevent.
- 5:42They are, they're, they're focused on telling you, hey,
- 5:45what's coming up right now that you need to block right now.
- 5:49And they're not very well empowered to actually prevent
- 5:54attacks or prevent abuse. And, and we're seeing that is in
- 5:58the scam space that it's just become completely rampant and
- 6:02super complex. And there is no, I haven't seen
- 6:06any, any good structured way of dealing with it at scale.
- 6:10Your second question was how did teams evolve?
- 6:13So some teams have evolved into connecting threat intelligence
- 6:17with detection and really doing their best to take all findings
- 6:22and tell, take new things that are found and putting them into
- 6:25into detection, putting them into the understanding of the
- 6:27attackers. On the other hand, a lot of
- 6:30teams have evolved into kind of working with how do we make the
- 6:36metrics look really good. So and it's kind of like two
- 6:39sides of the spectrum. There's a how do we work this?
- 6:42And those are those are the more complex teams of how do we
- 6:44actually identify what is, what is actually going on.
- 6:47And on the other side, you have the teams that evolved into,
- 6:50well, what can I measure? Let's just do that.
- 6:52And that's because that's going to give us more funding or make
- 6:56us look better. So imagine you would be head of
- 6:59the threat intelligence again at one of the companies that you
- 7:01work for and you have you've identified either an upcoming
- 7:07someone or one that might be on the horizon.
- 7:10How? What happens?
- 7:12What do you do? So from a threatened
- 7:13intelligence perspective, we want to understand what the
- 7:16attackers are doing. They have been doing other
- 7:18places. So for example, you take
- 7:21investigations that were done in other companies that are
- 7:24similar. You take reports from the FBI,
- 7:26reports from CISA, report from anything out there that can give
- 7:29you information which threat intelligence do that,
- 7:31Intelligence teams do that. And then you start also you want
- 7:35to understand what you are vulnerable to what, what attacks
- 7:40have happened on your platform in the recent past, in the
- 7:44further past that you did not identify.
- 7:47You can identify now hopefully, but what did you not identify in
- 7:50the past? And you synthesize this
- 7:53information to basically create a threat after journey.
- 7:57So we want to understand whether it's on our platform or not on
- 8:01our platform. So there's the end of the chain,
- 8:04which is what actually we saw and what happened.
- 8:07Where's the harm? But a good threat intelligence
- 8:10team or a good team will go and pick up all the pieces of how
- 8:15this happened along along the way.
- 8:18And the Holy Grail there is not how do we stop the attack is how
- 8:23do we make this exhausting and expensive for the attacker to
- 8:27get to the point of their attacking.
- 8:29At Facebook, one of the teams, they had this saying it was
- 8:32like, get off my platform and get off my platform says exactly
- 8:35that. I just want to make it so you
- 8:38just think that MAG platform is the worst place for you to be
- 8:42and you'll go somewhere else. And breaking down your path
- 8:45towards the attack is where that becomes more difficult because,
- 8:49and the really, really good teams that do that, they focus
- 8:52on the threat actor journeys and how to circumvent them along the
- 8:55way. Was there an incident or a
- 8:58threat in your career that was quite memorable that you have or
- 9:02have either lived through or prevented, that you could say of
- 9:07why it was so memorable? Yeah.
- 9:09So right before the 2020 elections, we were looking into
- 9:13specific actor group or a set of actor groups that in the past
- 9:18were taken down by the company was was very clear that this is
- 9:22we, we need this not to happen again.
- 9:24This happened in 2016. We need this not to happen again
- 9:27in 2020. So I received the the structure
- 9:30and the resources to actually deal with that at scale, meaning
- 9:34I could investigate it with the team that I had, but we also had
- 9:37a direct connection to the team that was deploying detection and
- 9:41operations and policy and then kind of put it all together.
- 9:45That was very successful because the the intelligence part of the
- 9:48team was able to identify what they're doing, identify how
- 9:51they're doing it, and then immediately put that into
- 9:54policy, into operational flows, into prevention and detection.
- 9:58And the great thing about it is that we literally saw them
- 10:02leaving the platform. They were talking to each other
- 10:05and saying we don't, this doesn't work for us anymore.
- 10:07We're now in 2026. Threat landscape moves faster
- 10:11than ever. Where do you see the biggest
- 10:13cracks in Be it detection, attribution, context,
- 10:17provenance? Choose the field that you want
- 10:19to explore with us. So the generic answer is AIAI
- 10:24makes everything bad and scary. It's true that with the advent
- 10:28of AI and we're God in the last three years, attackers are armed
- 10:33with more tools that can just make them faster and more agile.
- 10:37But the way I look at it is, while yes, this is a kind of
- 10:42somewhat of a pivot point that attackers are getting faster,
- 10:45but I feel attackers have been getting ahead of us for the at
- 10:49least the last six years, if not more.
- 10:52So they are already far ahead because of the way we were.
- 10:57Even as defenders, we don't know our product as well as as
- 11:01attackers know our product and our landscape.
- 11:03And I think kind of the thing I've always said is as an
- 11:06attacker, I can focus on on a target and then learn everything
- 11:11about that target and just keep going.
- 11:13As a defender, I need to defend everything that's coming across.
- 11:17So we're already hamstrung. So I think we've always been
- 11:21like that in trust and safety and in security that we're kind
- 11:24of like plugging holes and trying to get ahead of attacks
- 11:29now. So the attackers with AII able
- 11:31to do 2 things. One, they're able to be a lot
- 11:33faster. And two, they are able to
- 11:37enhance their knowledge and enhance their tactics by
- 11:40learning faster. It's not just automating, it's
- 11:42just they can automate and then they can learn from it really
- 11:45quickly and then they can iterate.
- 11:47And we get to a point that where we used to worry about the
- 11:51complex actors and the much less complex actors, but not and then
- 11:55we would say, OK, we would just make it very difficult for the
- 11:58non complex actors and then we'll deal with the more complex
- 12:00actors. But now a lot of the less
- 12:03complex actors have the ability to become a lot more agile, a
- 12:07lot more complex and challenge us a lot more, while we are kind
- 12:12of in the same space of we need to defend against everything.
- 12:16And now you're part of a podcast that looks at the intersection
- 12:20of tech and trust. But if I listen to you, I might
- 12:22assume that trust in tech is something that doesn't come
- 12:26naturally in the sense that you necessarily need to 1st think
- 12:31about everything that could happen before you start trusting
- 12:35into the ways that things don't happen or how is it for you.
- 12:39So I think the way I see trust, I see it from a practitioner
- 12:43perspective, trust is really important to me from first of
- 12:47like how do the customers trust you?
- 12:50And then how can I trust the data I'm looking at?
- 12:52And that the, if we go into the trusting the data I'm working
- 12:57with, that's really complex because as you grow in scale,
- 13:00it's much harder to validate what you're looking at and say,
- 13:04yeah, and this is 100% what's happening.
- 13:07And then I can, I can make assumptions from there.
- 13:10The problems that I've seen in the industry or in my specific
- 13:14work is if I can't trust my findings, then it's very hard
- 13:19for me to deploy them into something that's scaled because
- 13:24you can make a small mistake. And in a small company it might
- 13:27be a small issue. But as you scale, you're going
- 13:30to have, you're going to come across across growth, you're
- 13:33going to come across false positives, you're going to come
- 13:35across, you're going to break your network.
- 13:37So trusting in what you're doing, or at least the data
- 13:42you're dealing with, is very, very important.
- 13:44And you've now said that you're working on a business idea
- 13:47yourself and that you also look into the way of how data
- 13:51provenance can be deployed. Can you explain to me or also
- 13:56the listeners of what data provenance like really is and if
- 14:00it's connected to the way that you can trust data?
- 14:03So my friend and I now came up with an idea we called the our
- 14:07company Catalyst Labs. The idea behind it is how do we
- 14:13help companies not fight the same fires over and over and
- 14:16over again? How do we actually leverage the
- 14:19intelligence so it doesn't sit on a shelf somewhere?
- 14:22Because what I found and what I throughout the years, this is a
- 14:25systems engineering problem. Like I said, you have
- 14:28information security on one is like a system.
- 14:30You have threat intelligence that's tangential, but threat
- 14:34intelligence is only pulled in when it's necessary.
- 14:37And even then it's very difficult to take tactic
- 14:41techniques, procedures and actually narrative or prose and
- 14:45turn that into something you can you can deploy.
- 14:48So what I created and I'll explain the Providence thing is
- 14:52a way to take let's say an analyst or FBI said threat actor
- 14:57X does this and then this and then that and then and then does
- 15:00all these actions and this is how they X filled it, their
- 15:03information. How do we turn that into code?
- 15:06So my system, instead of producing it to a detection
- 15:09engineer, that will take hours or days or weeks to turn that
- 15:12into actual detection. We can do that within two
- 15:15minutes. But the first question that I
- 15:17had when I thought about it is if I do this with an LLM, if I
- 15:21do this with an AI, I don't trust it, especially at scale,
- 15:25because it can read whatever information is on the on the
- 15:29document and then it can infer something that's not true or it
- 15:33can get bias from the document. And that's where I came up with
- 15:37how do I have data provenance that I can actually go to to a
- 15:42team like the team I worked at at Facebook and say here is
- 15:45detection logic. But I know 100% that this came
- 15:50exactly from the document that you provided at the very core of
- 15:54the product, the extraction doesn't happen with the LLM.
- 15:57It's a lot more programmatic that that provides you the here
- 16:01is the rule and and then you have full provenance of it came
- 16:04from this page of the document that you provided me from this
- 16:07line. It is exactly what it says.
- 16:09This is why we turned it into this detection logic.
- 16:12And that's really critical because as I've been looking at
- 16:15other companies doing it, there's this sense in the
- 16:18industry that AI is this like magic tool that can do these
- 16:22things, can do AI can do a lot, but what it can't do because
- 16:26it's not built to do that is be deterministic.
- 16:30So while you can trust it for doing one report, maybe 2
- 16:33reports, as you start scaling you're going to start getting
- 16:37very weird information flowing your way that will look like
- 16:41it's real detection, but it's actually going to cause a lot
- 16:44more work than anything. Why do you think what you what
- 16:47you are building is so foundational?
- 16:51Also, how does it work? How can I?
- 16:53Yeah, if I use it, what would happen?
- 16:55OK, So the reason it's foundational in my eyes is that
- 16:59we've tried to do this forever. We've always tried to say how do
- 17:04we take our intelligence and make it so it's not shelf wear.
- 17:07So the intelligence is not just sitting there or, or for
- 17:10example, I would see an attack and then I would say, I worked
- 17:13on this exact thing three years ago.
- 17:16I remember this. It's the same issue.
- 17:18It's just a completely different actor.
- 17:19So this has always been a problem.
- 17:22And I think the one of the things that have changed is
- 17:26that, yes, you can start doing that more with the help of LLMS
- 17:29of turning intelligence into actual detection.
- 17:31But I think the deeper problem is different.
- 17:34The deeper problem is that this issue falls between teams.
- 17:39So that's the big foundational problem here.
- 17:41That's it's very, very difficult to have this even at smaller
- 17:47scale deployed across teams and have it.
- 17:50Work. And during your design process
- 17:52for the platform, what trade-offs do you face when you
- 17:55need to choose between speed or trust, openness and security,
- 18:00and usability versus verification?
- 18:02So right now my biggest trade off is speed and currently I'm
- 18:06OK with it. The speed is not that major,
- 18:09major of a difference. I would like it to be under a
- 18:12minute, but now it's 2 to 6 minutes depends on the size of
- 18:15the document. You cannot let go of the
- 18:17Providence. It must be there.
- 18:19So you can always the, the let's say that the secure engine
- 18:24engineer can always say I know exactly where this rule came
- 18:27from. And then it actually provides
- 18:29you with an audit trail that you can say that rule that that did
- 18:33XYZ, maybe that rule failed, maybe that rule's really
- 18:36effective. We can actually say that rule
- 18:39was created at this point by breaking down this type of
- 18:43report at that time. So the provenance and the trust
- 18:47are critical here. Much, much more than speed.
- 18:51And if we now do you see any issue with the new like AI tool
- 18:56providers that could potentially influence the user trust and
- 19:02that also you would advise them to change?
- 19:05Yes. So LLMS are non deterministic by
- 19:09design. If you tell it never do a thing,
- 19:12you are telling it be deterministic, always find this
- 19:15thing and never do it, and that's you're going against the
- 19:18design of the actual idea or the actual system.
- 19:21What I have been seeing with AI is a couple of things.
- 19:24There's a mad dash to implement AI into absolutely everything,
- 19:29and some places that's great. Some places don't really need
- 19:32it, but that's not the issue. The issue is that there is, I'm
- 19:37noticing this around leadership mostly of AI can just do
- 19:40everything. We'll just need to implement it
- 19:42and it will solve everything and it will automate.
- 19:44And then this, there's this push of you either implement AI or
- 19:48we're not going to talk to you. And then I am seeing new
- 19:51companies that are acting in kind of the same way machine
- 19:56learning works is this is a black box.
- 19:58You put your information, this spits out the right things and
- 20:01trust it. And we are putting a lot of
- 20:04trust into prompt engineering into.
- 20:09Specific models and saying, yeah, we'll put this here and it
- 20:13will just magically create what I wanted to create.
- 20:15And I think there's a big chasm opening between providers of AI
- 20:20solutions and actual practitioners.
- 20:22Have you ever worked in defense in some sort of defense tech and
- 20:27threat intelligence on a defense and regional kind of context?
- 20:31I have but not in tech. So I was in the military and I
- 20:35was doing defense, border defense, and interestingly
- 20:39enough, it is exactly the same concepts.
- 20:41That's what I wanted to get at because there's so much strategy
- 20:45in the way that threat intelligence needs to be
- 20:48designed and that could be translated either from a defence
- 20:52tech. And I do want to ask that
- 20:53because we're currently in quite tense times.
- 20:56Also from a regional perspective, I'm not getting
- 20:59into US, whatever Europe kind of discussion.
- 21:02I'd rather want to abstract, like have an abstract view on
- 21:06the way that this is approached. Do you have insights on that, on
- 21:10how this is moving forward according to your views?
- 21:14This is something I've said for for years in tech that we would
- 21:17see. So in kinetic defense, like
- 21:21order defense, we would see actors behave in a in a specific
- 21:25way. We would see actors pretending
- 21:27to be just benign activity. And that's really you can really
- 21:31correlate it to, for example, network defense of you're saying
- 21:34are you see actor go low and slow and or actor not automating
- 21:39but or making different automation that doesn't look
- 21:42like it's repetitive activity. What I have seen is that actors,
- 21:47bad actors, no matter what they are, their main job is to learn
- 21:51your defenses. And once they figure out your
- 21:54defenses, they will start chaining A vulnerability and
- 21:57another vulnerability and another vulnerability.
- 22:00So an example would be you have a fence with the border, you
- 22:04have cameras on the fence. You will it will it will take
- 22:07them, could take them a year. They will find the place where
- 22:10they get to the fence and you're not seeing them with the
- 22:12cameras. And then they will see how long
- 22:15it takes you to actually show up when they touch the fence.
- 22:18And what do they need to do if they need to not touch the
- 22:20fence. And then a lot of times we see
- 22:24those as specific atomic instances and we'll say, oh, so
- 22:29we need to add a camera here. Oh, we need a response time to
- 22:32be faster. But what they're doing is
- 22:34they're testing, continuously testing until they can say I
- 22:38know instead of a zero day, I can now say that I know exactly
- 22:44where you can't see me, how long it is until you see me.
- 22:48If I, if I do something, how long it will take you to get
- 22:51here. And then I can figure out my
- 22:53tactic around that. Where do I strike?
- 22:56How long will it take? What exactly what are the tools
- 22:59that I need to use in order for you to not see me?
- 23:02I think that the military is a lot better at that because their
- 23:04lifes are at stake. There aren't metrics that you
- 23:06need to measure. You measure and how many people
- 23:08died. You don't even measure that.
- 23:10But there's a lot of in the, in the military that there was
- 23:13constant learning. And I, I think this is a part of
- 23:17kind of space that I'm seeing that there is time to learn.
- 23:21We are constantly chasing the new thing that's happening.
- 23:24We are unable to, to learn which is, which is, it's a scale
- 23:29issue. It's how many attackers are
- 23:31attacking you issue, which the military doesn't have in the
- 23:33same way. But that's the thing that I've
- 23:35been always leaning towards at any company that I've been.
- 23:39I said, OK, there was a big attack, something happened.
- 23:42Are we doing a postmortem? And you would start doing a
- 23:44postmortem and then who has time for that?
- 23:46A new, new fire came. Now we need to fix this.
- 23:49So that's at least when I look at at issues like that, I look
- 23:53at them from that perspective. And for someone who's now
- 23:56building up a threat intelligence team, what are the
- 23:59top three things that you would advise them to do?
- 24:02The top thing to do first is to understand your platform as well
- 24:08as you can. It's very, very hard, but you
- 24:10really need to understand the platform and appreciate that
- 24:13you're not going to understand the platform as well as your
- 24:15attackers, but do your very, very best to understand the
- 24:18attackers, the platform. Then the second thing is to
- 24:22break down your adversaries into adversaries that are are
- 24:27opportunistic or like low sophistication.
- 24:30And then kind of what's the scale of that versus attackers
- 24:34that are going to attack you? They're going to wait and do
- 24:36something massive and and work with that the and can really
- 24:40understand the threat actor journeys for both.
- 24:43The last critical thing is relationships must be on
- 24:48understanding your product. You must if you're a threat
- 24:50Intel team, you need to understand how the detection
- 24:53teams work. What do they need from you?
- 24:57What are they gold on and then work with them to empower them
- 25:03and the business versus being a team that says no, don't do this
- 25:07now do that you want to understand your partners and
- 25:10then see how can I empower them to move forward safely and with
- 25:15adherence of the law and the word escapes me regulations.
- 25:20If we now come back to the lab that you built and the platform
- 25:24that you aim to deploy in the future, so how does provenance
- 25:27help us rebuild the concept of evidence in that world and also
- 25:31for a particular potential users?
- 25:34So that's a great question. The, the most critical thing
- 25:37that I'm thinking about when I'm building is how do we build a
- 25:42knowledge corpus that we know an attack happened or, or we
- 25:46learned something. Now we can utilize it to learn
- 25:50something else or now we can, when something new comes, we can
- 25:53say we actually have this in our, in our, you know, evidence
- 25:57storage. And we, we put a new report and
- 26:00we say actually that's another attack that happened somewhere
- 26:04else or happened with us a month ago, a year ago, or this is
- 26:08something that we got from the FBI couple of months ago.
- 26:10We should actually incorporate that information into what we're
- 26:13doing. The way I was thinking about it
- 26:15is one, we create this knowledge corpus of everything that's
- 26:19happening and two, we are able to remove the friction between
- 26:24teams into something that flows a lot faster.
- 26:27Instead of producing something that an detection engineer will
- 26:30have to now figure out what to do with, you produce them with
- 26:34here's here's actual detection that you just need to review and
- 26:38deploy and then you can go do the other things you want to do.
- 26:41This actually brings all these teams together into having the
- 26:44ability to circumvent the attackers together.
- 26:47And if you now look ahead in a near future, what do you see?
- 26:51What will be critical to deploy and also to follow through from
- 26:55a platform provider and from a user perspective?
- 26:59So I think one of the critical things to deploy are well is, is
- 27:05a robust understanding. We are currently talking about
- 27:09it. I see people frustrated with
- 27:11attacks that keep coming back. They that I see it a lot in
- 27:14scams of we are expecting other other entities to save us.
- 27:20For example, we're expecting the government to create rules to to
- 27:25save us, which which is great. The government, the government
- 27:27creates rules that makes companies do things.
- 27:29That's great that that usually doesn't happen because what
- 27:34happens is that the government creates rules, smart company
- 27:37figures out how to do the very bare minimum.
- 27:40So I think what we need to move forward is if I think about it
- 27:44from the AI perspective, is one of the things that's really
- 27:47critical is not to look at AI as how can we use, how can we have
- 27:51less people? How can we reduce headcount?
- 27:53But instead, how do we give the people that we have superpowers
- 27:58so they're faster. They're, they can, they can
- 28:01analyze things faster, they can deploy things faster.
- 28:04And that's again where the trust comes in and the Providence
- 28:07comes in that as we move faster, we also need to move with
- 28:11confidence. We need to know that what we're
- 28:13doing is the correct issue so we don't fall back into
- 28:17firefighting. Most teams are just stuck in
- 28:19firefighting mode and it's very, very hard to get out of that.
- 28:23But I think if we don't get out of firefighting mode, we're
- 28:26going to continue losing. We're now coming to the end of
- 28:29our podcast, even though I could talk to you probably for another
- 28:32hour. And before we end our
- 28:34conversation, I want to get into some in between moments with
- 28:37you. At the first moment that I want
- 28:39to start with you is what does trust online feels like to you?
- 28:43Currently, Trust Online feels like a pipe dream, like fiction.
- 28:46And what is the one thing that AI must verify in the future?
- 28:50AI needs to verify both the output and the input.
- 28:53Have AI verify both the input that is not junk and the output
- 28:58that it can actually relates to something that wasn't invented
- 29:02by the LLM. What is the biggest blind spot
- 29:05in information security? Bias on that, But the biggest
- 29:08blind spot is adversarial complexity.
- 29:11Everybody likes to talk about adversarial complexity, but then
- 29:14it ends up being a discussion about 0 days, which persistent
- 29:18actors don't use zero days Willy nilly.
- 29:21They consistently get around you daily without 0 days.
- 29:25I need a sidestep here. What are 0 days 0?
- 29:28Day is an exploit that nobody has heard of before.
- 29:31Is this is a new vulnerability that nobody has heard of that
- 29:34they can they can now leverage and there are no defenses for it
- 29:38because this is the first time it's ever been used.
- 29:40All right. Understood.
- 29:42What does provenance unlock? Provenance unlocks trust in the
- 29:46system, trust in the fact that you can move forward without
- 29:51without creating a additional fiction.
- 29:53What is the future that we are not preparing for?
- 29:57I think we're not preparing. I think we're talking about it a
- 29:59lot, but nobody's really preparing for the future where
- 30:03threat actors will be using image, voice, video generation
- 30:07to completely go around any current static mitigations.
- 30:12And what is one word that you're currently in between?
- 30:14Currently in between. I'm currently stuck on on
- 30:18accuracy and robustness. I think those are the words.
- 30:22What do you mean with that? So as I'm building and working
- 30:26with partners and people to work with on deploying this product,
- 30:31I constantly see opportunities to make the rules more robust,
- 30:34to make the rules more accurate. But that's how you get into
- 30:38analysis paralysis of like, we are not, we are not there yet.
- 30:42We're not there yet where we need to worry about that, that
- 30:44much. This needs to work.
- 30:46And then we'll see how we make it work better.
- 30:48But accuracy is very important to me and also robustness that
- 30:52I'm not telling you here's an attack or here's a threat.
- 30:55And this is how you can mitigate it.
- 30:57And you can say, oh, actually you're missing a bunch of parts.
- 31:00That's that's the thing that scares me the most.
- 31:02For now, thank you so much for the time, for sharing all your
- 31:06insights, and for joining us on the podcast.
- 31:09Thank you so much. I appreciate it.