Cybersecurity in the Age of Instant Software

AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: “instant software.” Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand—a spreadsheet, for example—and delete it when you’re done using it than to buy one commercially. Future systems could include a mix: both traditional long-term software and ephemeral instant software that is constantly being written, deployed, modified, and deleted. AI is changing cybersecurity as well. In particular, AI systems are getting better at finding and patching vulnerabilities in code. This has implications for both attackers and defenders, depending on the ways this and related technologies improve. In this essay, I want to take an optimistic view of AI’s progress, and to speculate what AI-dominated cybersecurity in an age of instant software might look like. There are a number of unknowns that will factor into how the arms race between attacker and defender might play out. How flaw discovery might work On the attacker side, the ability of AIs to automatically find and exploit vulnerabilities has increased dramatically over the past few months. We are already seeing both government and criminal hackers using AI to attack systems. The exploitation part is critical here, because it gives an unsophisticated attacker capabilities far beyond their understanding. As AIs get better, expect more attackers to automate their attacks using AI. And as individuals and organizations can increasingly run powerful AI models locally, AI companies monitoring and disrupting malicious AI use will become increasingly irrelevant. Expect open-source software, including open-source libraries incorporated in proprietary software, to be the most targeted, because vulnerabilities are easier to find in source code. Unknown No. 1 is how well AI vulnerability discovery tools will work against closed-source commercial software packages. I believe they will soon be good enough to find vulnerabilities just by analyzing a copy of a shipped product, without access to the source code. If that’s true, commercial software will be vulnerable as well. Particularly vulnerable will be software in IoT devices: things like internet-connected cars, refrigerators, and security cameras. Also industrial IoT software in our internet-connected power grid, oil refineries and pipelines, chemical plants, and so on. IoT software tends to be of much lower quality, and industrial IoT software tends to be legacy. Instant software is differently vulnerable. It’s not mass market. It’s created for a particular person, organization, or network. The attacker generally won’t have access to any code to analyze, which makes it less likely to be exploited by external attackers. If it’s ephemeral, any vulnerabilities will have a short lifetime. But lots of instant software will live on networks for a long time. And if it gets