Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another riveting episode of the
Speaker:data driven podcast. Today, we're diving into the
Speaker:fascinating and sometimes terrifying world of IT security.
Speaker:Joining us is none other than the formidable Kevin Latchford, an
Speaker:expert in safeguarding our digital lives. We'll be discussing
Speaker:the vulnerabilities of large language models. Yes. Those clever
Speaker:algorithms behind chatbots and virtual assistants like yours
Speaker:truly. Are these digital wordsmiths a blessing or a
Speaker:potential security threat? Stay tuned as we unravel
Speaker:the secrets and risks lurking in the code.
Speaker:Hello, and welcome back to Data Driven. I'm your host,
Speaker:Frank Lavinia. And while Andy is out
Speaker:playing on vacation, I had the opportunity to invite our guest,
Speaker:Kevin Latchford, who recently spoke at the Northern Virginia
Speaker:Cyber Meetup on securing large language
Speaker:models and the most pressing exploits that are out there.
Speaker:What really got me interested in this is that I saw a paper, I think
Speaker:it was published by NIST, talking about vulnerabilities and red
Speaker:teaming against large language models. So welcome to the
Speaker:show, Kevin. Great pleasure to be here.
Speaker:Awesome. Awesome. So for those that don't know, I kinda know what red teaming is
Speaker:because my wife works in the security space. But for those that are not necessarily
Speaker:familiar with the term, what is red teaming versus blue teaming?
Speaker:Well, red teaming versus blue teaming is basically it's,
Speaker:basically in military parlance that we called opt for, the opposing
Speaker:force. The opposing force often is called the red
Speaker:force. Blue force is your, friendlies.
Speaker:And, basically, this is offensive cybersecurity,
Speaker:whereas blue teaming is is defensive
Speaker:cybersecurity. The tools are different. The
Speaker:methodologies are the methodologies are different, but they come together for a common
Speaker:purpose. The common purpose is the assurance of the
Speaker:confidentiality, the integrity, and the accessibility
Speaker:of a computer network, computer system,
Speaker:application, whether it be natively hosted or web.
Speaker:Interesting. Interesting. So we're not you you know, we talked
Speaker:in the virtual green room. People don't think of
Speaker:LLMs as a major security flaw. And I think that
Speaker:I find that a little dangerous, and I think you're gonna tell me it's very
Speaker:dangerous. Well, it could be quite it could be quite dangerous, you
Speaker:know, to the point of, you know, frankly, near deadly,
Speaker:depending on what you use it for. The big thing, there's a lot
Speaker:of misconceptions about AI and l the LLMs
Speaker:that is they're based on. Number 1, it is not
Speaker:conscious. Right. 2, it is not a toy,
Speaker:and number 3, it is literally,
Speaker:something that is at present, not
Speaker:not necessarily, you know,
Speaker:fully understood, in in regards to the integrations
Speaker:and the things it may need to work with. You can't treat an
Speaker:LOM exactly the way
Speaker:you would treat, another enterprise application that's a little
Speaker:bit less opaque because LLMs are opaque on the on the
Speaker:inside, but you have to, for the purposes of
Speaker:security regulation, for the purposes of security compliance, you
Speaker:have to treat them, though, nonetheless, the same as any other
Speaker:enterprise application. So that's the conundrum. The conundrum
Speaker:is, how do you see into something that's
Speaker:opaque? And the way you do it is kind of
Speaker:what I discussed in that in that, in that paper, in
Speaker:that presentation, as well as one of the biggest
Speaker:vulnerabilities and that being jailbreaking. Yeah. So tell me about that
Speaker:because there's been a lot of, concerns
Speaker:about jailbreaking and, and I've noticed that
Speaker:the public facing GPTs have a ridiculous amount
Speaker:of safeguards around them to the point where, you know, if you
Speaker:ask it to describe something. Right? I asked it to talk
Speaker:about the to generate an image for the Butlerian jihad,
Speaker:right, which is a concept in June. And, obviously, I think the jihad
Speaker:term really freaked it out. Listen. I'm sorry. I can't do that.
Speaker:So there's clearly I understand why these safeguards are in place, but it seems
Speaker:like it's not that hard to get around them. Well, not
Speaker:necessarily. It depends on the model you're working with. For those of you
Speaker:who may use private LLMs because a
Speaker:wider issue on that is actually the DOD and many other government
Speaker:agencies actually prohibit the usage of public LLM
Speaker:systems, public AI, because they're concerned about unauthorized
Speaker:linkages as well as, data point model
Speaker:poisoning, prompt injections, things like
Speaker:that. So you often you're using these private elements. Several of these are
Speaker:uncensored. Right. Which means they do not have those safeguards.
Speaker:The ones that you see on the public space are supposed to have those safeguards,
Speaker:but you're never a 100% sure they're working because they may have been
Speaker:corrupted. In their regards to jailbreaking,
Speaker:jailbreaking is basically you're getting it to do something
Speaker:it's not supposed to do by either, a, breaking the guardrails,
Speaker:or by, b, influencing it
Speaker:through almost methods of interrogation to
Speaker:kind of break it down and make it talk. So
Speaker:it it literally is almost like that. So for those of you who, you know,
Speaker:kind of look at the it's it's kind of a there there's a great,
Speaker:neurophilosopher. His name is Jay Fodor and Nernschild named Richard Searle
Speaker:discussing the the philosophy of the mind as it applied to, computer
Speaker:technology. Several of the arguments that they say, well, the brain is like a
Speaker:computer. Yeah. You can kinda treat it like a human mind
Speaker:in the way you approach it in your prompts, but it isn't exactly the same.
Speaker:Once again, as I say, it is not conscious. It is not, and and it
Speaker:operates under a very strict set of parameters.
Speaker:But that being said, yes, you can literally interrogate it to do that.
Speaker:I'm not gonna say here, unfortunately, how,
Speaker:because, one, there are security reasons why we would
Speaker:not do that, a. And, b, there's also I mean,
Speaker:literally, in my presentation, that is all the news that has
Speaker:come to Academia and much of the industry
Speaker:today. There are new ones out there, but they haven't been discovered
Speaker:yet. Right. So I many ways to jailbreak. Yeah. And I was thinking, like
Speaker:so one of your slides I have pulled up here is, like, the top 10
Speaker:threats to LLM applications. I didn't think there were as many as
Speaker:10. So I knew that there were. I also know that
Speaker:data poisoning, for me, as a data scientist, data engineer,
Speaker:my first look at this when I saw this, aside from
Speaker:the g whiz bang factor of LLMs, was,
Speaker:wow. This isn't the data that trains this is a huge attack surface.
Speaker:And then when I first said that, people thought I was a tinfoil hatter.
Speaker:Right? And then slowly but surely, you're seeing research papers come
Speaker:out saying, like, no. We have to treat kind of the data as part of
Speaker:a secure software supply chain, which is an
Speaker:interesting concept because data people tend not to it's something they don't
Speaker:think about security. They think about security different. Is that a fair
Speaker:assessment in your that you've seen?
Speaker:Supply chains and the integrity of
Speaker:data is something that is not often, it
Speaker:seems, given the respect it's probably due. To be
Speaker:honest, I don't think so. In my own experience, I see it.
Speaker:It's not I guess one would say maybe it's not
Speaker:necessarily consistent. Maybe that's the fair way to put it. That's a
Speaker:really good way to put it. Yeah. And, I mean, right now, we're just now
Speaker:getting into discussion of, SBOM, software
Speaker:bill bill of materials Okay. Just for regular applications.
Speaker:I mean, it's a whole another level with LLMs and the
Speaker:models they're trained on, the models that these systems are trained on.
Speaker:So, yeah, that there's very much. So you have to make sure you're getting it
Speaker:from the right source, and you have to make sure that it hasn't been tampered
Speaker:with because it could very well be tampered with.
Speaker:It's not necessarily that hard. Right. Right. You
Speaker:could you could poison it with just one little segment of changing the
Speaker:the thing and across across 5 gigs of let's just say 5
Speaker:gigs. You know, that'd be like looking for a needle in the haystack.
Speaker:Precisely. In fact, that's what I talk about with the cockpit example that I
Speaker:gave. If I teach that l and to make sure that every time it puts
Speaker:in code to put in this malicious code that is a backdoor
Speaker:Right. Well, okay. It will do that. Every time somebody does,
Speaker:it embeds it into software code that is returned in the output for
Speaker:the prompt. If it does that, and let's say this
Speaker:is handed amongst several things, different
Speaker:applications, different solutions. Well, then if
Speaker:people take that that
Speaker:solution, that application, and it's in their software bill of
Speaker:materials, and then it gets distributed. Open source often
Speaker:gets proliferated very quickly. Right. And then it finds itself in
Speaker:there. You have a log floor 4 j situation.
Speaker:Right. Very similar except for the fact this thing
Speaker:is semi self executing. Now if it's semi self
Speaker:executing, you have a problem. You have a
Speaker:big problem. And I know I I just generally in industry. Now, obviously, you you
Speaker:spoke with the Northern Virginia. You're based in Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia is
Speaker:probably a little bit more security focused in terms
Speaker:of just who's based in that area than your average enterprise. Right?
Speaker:And I just I just see a lot of enterprises rushing to get into this
Speaker:LLM and Gen AI craze, but I don't see a lot of
Speaker:forethought or concern around security. And I just see a big
Speaker:disaster coming. Like, I I feel like I'm at I feel like I'm on the
Speaker:bridge of the Titanic, and I'm looking at something in the distance, and we're going
Speaker:full steam ahead. And I'm like, hey. Maybe we should
Speaker:not slow down, but be a little more cautious that we are in dangerous
Speaker:waters. Is that is that what you've seen too? Obviously, your customers
Speaker:and your clients may be a little more security cognizant.
Speaker:Well, I would say that I mean, I'm okay. We'll use the Titanic
Speaker:analogy. I'm the one up in the crows nest, you know, yelling into the radio
Speaker:phone, I see an iceberg. Right. Right. So I mean, that
Speaker:I agree. And that is a big issue because
Speaker:also there is this over reliance. Mhmm.
Speaker:Yeah. I imagine that as one of the top threats. So tell me about there's
Speaker:22 of those that I have very, very interesting questions about, but one of them
Speaker:was overreliance. So when you say overreliance on LLMs, what do you mean?
Speaker:Well, this is actually this is a sort of c suite, board
Speaker:level, thing as well as a engineering
Speaker:department level. They want to use AI to
Speaker:replace employees, make their operations more cost effective,
Speaker:more profitable. The problem is and this is a popular conception.
Speaker:This kind of goes into that argument about AI will take your job.
Speaker:This is a bit of a misunderstanding. It's not
Speaker:supposed to fully replace people. It's supposed to make them highly
Speaker:productive and efficient. They
Speaker:also do not necessarily feel like, well, the thing handles itself,
Speaker:so I can just wind it up and let it go. It doesn't need observation.
Speaker:It can fully self regulate. That would be true if
Speaker:there was a regulating function. You don't run a steam engine without
Speaker:a regulator on it. You need a regulator for LLMs.
Speaker:So the same concept applies. So first of all, there is this, it can do
Speaker:it itself, and a person is not necessary.
Speaker:This is incorrect. You most certainly need people.
Speaker:A great example I give in a recent presentation I've written
Speaker:is a discussion of, well, what does this mean to the organization?
Speaker:Well, a lot of level 1 tech, tech
Speaker:support jobs, there a lot of people say, well, those people are gonna get replaced.
Speaker:Well, yes, but someone needs to still be behind that LLM
Speaker:running the prompts, you know, and executing them in such an word and
Speaker:making interpretations based on the output.
Speaker:So that would be maybe something okay. Is that a dedicated job, or is that
Speaker:something you give to interns? Well, that would be, like, in,
Speaker:in the union trades you call an apprentice.
Speaker:That's the kind of thing. There's still a person involved. It's
Speaker:just not the same way we've done it before. Right.
Speaker:Also, on the subject of security, if you
Speaker:don't understand the security implications
Speaker:of it, you don't have controls for it. If you don't have controls for
Speaker:it, you can't mitigate that risk. And if you can't
Speaker:mitigate that risk, that's the liability.
Speaker:And if you're over reliant, you basically set up the whole system for LOMs, and
Speaker:then, you know, you just allow your customers to just come in and interact with
Speaker:the device. Well, if something
Speaker:happens, it would be treated very much like it
Speaker:was on any other application, so then you're now engaging
Speaker:in liabilities, loss of reputation, potential
Speaker:civil and criminal penalties, the list goes on.
Speaker:And a point on those 10 those 10,
Speaker:security issues, this is OWOX who is saying this.
Speaker:This is the open source, web application project.
Speaker:So we have, you know, a number of them
Speaker:that are a number of organizations, OOS is just the one I chose, they're
Speaker:kind of emphasizing this. They're saying, you know, don't think
Speaker:this thing can think for itself. Don't think this thing can act for itself.
Speaker:You need to look at it as humans are going to
Speaker:interact with it, and humans probably should be watching it.
Speaker:Right. So once again, it's that lack of controls leads to
Speaker:the risk. Yeah. I think the dream of it replacing
Speaker:everybody is gonna be at the root cause of
Speaker:a lot of problems down the road. I think I'm a firm believer
Speaker:in human in the loop. One of the the the interesting thing
Speaker:there and, that I see that was particularly
Speaker:curious was excessive agency. What do you mean by that? Because that got my
Speaker:attention. I think I know what it means, but I wanna hear it from you.
Speaker:Well, excessive agency is you're giving you you're kinda giving, you know,
Speaker:full the whole keys to the car. Right. There's
Speaker:no role based access control. If every user has near
Speaker:admin or actual admin privileges,
Speaker:that's that's actually something dangerous. A point of example,
Speaker:NetworkChuck just released a video on how to build your own
Speaker:AI on a very low cost platform.
Speaker:I love Network Chuck, and I have followed that step. You
Speaker:too. I'm doing I'm doing the same thing as he is because I have kids,
Speaker:and I want them to be able to use these things. But 1, I don't
Speaker:wanna pay the extra subscription. 2, I don't want them using mine. And 3, I
Speaker:don't really like what they're doing. I can at least exercise adult
Speaker:judgment on what I ask it and what I don't ask it. I don't think
Speaker:they can, and I don't think that's fair to put on kids. Sorry for the
Speaker:aside, but big shout out to network. No. That's fair. No. That's fair. That's exactly
Speaker:why Chuck was. And one
Speaker:thing about it is the first account that signs into the open
Speaker:web interface for Ollama sets you
Speaker:as admin Right. By default.
Speaker:Okay. Well, immediately, you need to engage role based access
Speaker:control to make sure that the next account does not get that same privilege.
Speaker:Maybe you should be given it. But is there any
Speaker:major access controls in the public ones?
Speaker:Not really. Private one? Is everybody thinking about that? Not
Speaker:really. I mean, I think Microsoft is doing some things around that because it's they're
Speaker:they're trying to integrate it with Office or m 365. But I
Speaker:don't I I I can't and if anyone in the sound of my voice wants
Speaker:to come on the show and talk about that, please do. But you're right. I
Speaker:don't think people do. And I also think excessive agency.
Speaker:What you heard about the car dealership, right, in Silicon Valley?
Speaker:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for those who don't know, somebody
Speaker:managed to almost interrogate, like you said,
Speaker:to browbeat a AI chatbot to give
Speaker:him a it was a Chevy Tahoe or something like that for $1
Speaker:Chevy. It was a it was a Chevy truck
Speaker:and for $1. Now I'm not an automotive industry
Speaker:veteran, but I do know that if you sell 40,000, $50,000,
Speaker:cars for $1 a pop, you're not gonna be in business very long.
Speaker:So was that an example of excessive agency? I mean, clearly, it's an example of
Speaker:bad implementation. Almost certainly. That is. I mean, if you have
Speaker:the ability to trick if you have the ability to kind
Speaker:of browbeat it to override it and say, no. No. No. You don't understand me.
Speaker:You will do this. Well, then, okay,
Speaker:leave it to whatever
Speaker:gremlins there are out there on the web, out there in the
Speaker:world. Inside user, external user,
Speaker:irrelevant. If they can if just anybody can do that,
Speaker:you're the problem. Right. In this case, it was
Speaker:you could influence the model to set a
Speaker:certain price after arguing with it. Right. I actually
Speaker:found something recently, and I'm not gonna say which, LLM I
Speaker:did this on. It is a public one, and this is a
Speaker:result I suspect of another issue.
Speaker:I saw I tried to get some
Speaker:cybersecurity information from it when I was doing, a
Speaker:a try hack me exercise with a local cybersecurity group,
Speaker:hackers and hops. And I browbeat it
Speaker:saying, no. You don't understand. I need this for a cybersecurity
Speaker:exercise, and it gave me this information. Now this is absolute dual
Speaker:use knowledge. Right. It could be used for good. It could be used
Speaker:for evil. White hat or black hat. But the fact
Speaker:that you could do it,
Speaker:that sounds very dangerous. That sounds very dangerous.
Speaker:Prompt injection. Is that is that still a thing with
Speaker:the major public models, or is it just one of those things we're gonna live
Speaker:with for the rest of our lives? To be honest, I'm not
Speaker:sure. I mean, it's a case of, well, what is the prompt you're putting
Speaker:in? Right. When I talk about jailbreaking, I talked about,
Speaker:base 64 encrypt your text message
Speaker:into base 64. Why? Because that's how the prompt is seen
Speaker:by the LLM. Right. In other words, ASCII
Speaker:text. It doesn't check it, but it processes the text
Speaker:just the same. Oh, that sounds bad.
Speaker:It gets worse. Multi shot. Bury a
Speaker:malicious prompt inside the whole load of prompt,
Speaker:and fire hose it at the at the LM.
Speaker:It's not gonna check every single prompt. So if you bury 1
Speaker:in there, it might process that one and give you an answer
Speaker:it's not supposed to give. That's because the guardrails didn't engage.
Speaker:Interesting. So the guardrails are not necessarily on by default.
Speaker:Well, no. They are on by default, but if it overloads it,
Speaker:it may it may slip the net. So rather than shut
Speaker:down, it it shuts off? Well, Well, it's
Speaker:basically what you're doing is effectively a buffer overflow. You're basically using
Speaker:an injection method to induce what is effectively
Speaker:analogous to a buffer overflow. That's wild. That's
Speaker:not how I would have thought it would have worked. Interesting.
Speaker:Interesting. This is a fascinating space. So
Speaker:Yes. One of the things that I think people
Speaker:don't realize is
Speaker:just the sick insecure ways in
Speaker:which these plug ins could be designed. Right? Because, like, everyone's all
Speaker:gaga about these plug ins, and I look at it. I'm like, where am I
Speaker:sending my data? Right? Am I gonna read the 30 page EULA? Right? Or
Speaker:am I just gonna say, yes. Yes. Yes. I wanna do what I'm doing.
Speaker:Is that really a problem? It is.
Speaker:Because that kind of ties into unauthorized leakages.
Speaker:Right. How do I know that plug in is a secure
Speaker:connection into the l one, and there's nothing in between?
Speaker:Right. Or that it will contain what I get it.
Speaker:How do I know? I don't know. That's the thing is that is this plug
Speaker:in itself secure, and is its connection to the
Speaker:LLM secure, And is that LLM also
Speaker:integral? So, yeah, I could send it in there, but how do I
Speaker:know that along the way, something you know, the pipe might leak?
Speaker:So you need to check it. Just and, I mean, this goes I mean, this
Speaker:is very similar to APIs. This is very similar to,
Speaker:all sorts of remote interfacing. Just good engineering
Speaker:short lived. Just good engineering discipline seems to be
Speaker:missing from a lot of this because people are focused on the AI,
Speaker:not necessarily the underlying infrastructure that
Speaker:has to support it. Indeed. And I think that that's
Speaker:but that's the whole thing is that there is this massive trend as
Speaker:of late. I mean, perhaps it wasn't really emphasized
Speaker:before. I'm sure it was there, but it's now becoming very, you
Speaker:know, reiterated that we need to have security by
Speaker:design. Right. The security by design is already we're already doing
Speaker:that in other enterprise applications. Same should be applied to
Speaker:LLMs. Security by design. You check the code. You check the
Speaker:model. You check everything. And while it's operating,
Speaker:you check it. One of the biggest things you can do to overcome the
Speaker:opacity of an LLM, export
Speaker:the logs, export the comp the prompts.
Speaker:Have it processed. Now you could potentially process it.
Speaker:I'd figure the way you process any other kind of log data.
Speaker:The other thing you can do is use machine learning or
Speaker:an air gapped isolated LLM
Speaker:specifically trained to look for signatures,
Speaker:words, phrases, things like that. And when
Speaker:these patterns match, it returns saying, I found
Speaker:something that looks suspect. This is suspect.
Speaker:Here is the user who did this. Here is their IP.
Speaker:Like every other bit of log security log information we would get.
Speaker:So that would help piece together the trail to figure out, are these a
Speaker:bad actor, or is this the happenstance? Exactly.
Speaker:And that is one way you can do it because once you have the
Speaker:internal prompts and you have the internal logs and
Speaker:those are exported out, you now can see in.
Speaker:Right. The biggest problem is you gotta have that monitoring. You have to have that
Speaker:transparency. The elements are so large, you
Speaker:can't so easily see into them, but if you're taking the data out, it's a
Speaker:lot clearer. So you can kind of follow what the LLM is doing,
Speaker:if not, what's inside of it? Precisely. And the advantage
Speaker:is is if you use another LLM that is specifically designed
Speaker:to, you know, interrogate the prompts and look through
Speaker:them, examine them, scan them, whatever word you wish to use.
Speaker:You can find out where it is because that
Speaker:is not gonna be so easy to break the guardrails because it's examining
Speaker:one little bit at a time. It's looking at the individual prompts. It's not really
Speaker:it it's kind of agnostic about everything around it. It can get it can kind
Speaker:of filter out the new leads. Interesting. That's
Speaker:I mean, it's just so fascinating kind of to start pulling the thread at this,
Speaker:and there's a lot more. It's like I found there's a story about a guy
Speaker:who was renovating his basement, and he found, like, this ancient underground city. That's how
Speaker:I feel when I just get kicked back. It's true. It happened in
Speaker:Turkey. Like, he found, like, this underground network from, like, Byzantine
Speaker:or Roman times. That's what I feel like. I I like, wow. Like,
Speaker:this really goes down deep. So what's an
Speaker:inference attack? Because I've heard of that. What's an inference attack? We discussed that,
Speaker:or have we touched on that? Well, inference is
Speaker:basically what you're inferring to, the answer you are seeking.
Speaker:So, basically, it's basically, to the
Speaker:the inference is literally, the
Speaker:prompt that you are entering in and what you're getting out. Okay.
Speaker:More or less. So how is that an attack surface? Well,
Speaker:basically, you're you're chaining it. You're daisy chaining your attacks.
Speaker:You're trying to infer things. You're trying to kinda subtly
Speaker:get through. So it's a bit like it's a maybe
Speaker:more like cross examination from an attorney, a hostile attorney
Speaker:I would say that. Yeah. More than more than, like,
Speaker:interrogation or torture or or whatever verb we used
Speaker:earlier. Yes. Interesting. What's
Speaker:model inversion? Model inversion is
Speaker:basically you trying to spill the model itself. Oh. You're trying
Speaker:to kind of you're trying to kind of tear the
Speaker:guts tear the guts out, maybe put stuff in there,
Speaker:things of that kind. Interesting.
Speaker:Interesting. Where do
Speaker:we stand on the
Speaker:criminal and civil liabilities here? Right? I I I know that Air
Speaker:Canada had to pay a fine because they promised that its
Speaker:chatbot promised somebody something.
Speaker:I don't know where the California Chevy Tahoe thing
Speaker:is. But, I mean, have the laws
Speaker:caught up? Or, like, how were how is this generally looking like?
Speaker:Well, it depends. I mean, all jurisdictions are different, but I would
Speaker:suspect to say that whatever guarantees
Speaker:you make, you're bound to them. So
Speaker:probably disclaimers, indemnification is
Speaker:probably extremely wise. I would say,
Speaker:unfortunately, I'm not a legal expert. Right. Right. Right.
Speaker:Specifically to the law. Right. But as I'd say, I'd have
Speaker:enough legal understanding to probably say that if you make a promise,
Speaker:you better put your money where your mouth is. So that's why I back it
Speaker:up. IBM indemnifying their users for using one
Speaker:of their Granite models is probably a big deal for
Speaker:businesses. Because just in case somebody I'm sure that there's
Speaker:all fine print and things like that, but that that would be an appealing
Speaker:thing for business users. Yes.
Speaker:Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker:How does someone get started in learning how to jailbreak these? Like, is this is
Speaker:this a typical your background is, IT security.
Speaker:But what about someone who has a background in, say, AI and and and building
Speaker:these LLMs? Is that, Gunning, you think, be an another career
Speaker:path for the what we call data scientists today?
Speaker:Well, I would say you're gonna have to probably do it just as is. I
Speaker:think to the developers and to the data science Right. Scientists who work on this,
Speaker:you're gonna have to be security literate. Right.
Speaker:For those who want to get into it, I mean, data science is like any
Speaker:other AI trade. I mean, we often
Speaker:cross pollinate. So I would say that you might have an understanding
Speaker:already of these things. These prompt injections, as I say, are not
Speaker:much different than SQL injections. The data science Right. You probably know what that is.
Speaker:How you transfer it depends on what you know.
Speaker:I would say most data sciences do understand how some of this stuff
Speaker:works. Right. So getting into it is
Speaker:just basically you just learning more about security. Right. For the
Speaker:average person trying to get into it, I would say, if you're trying to
Speaker:get into AI security, know security
Speaker:first, and there are many ways to get into
Speaker:it. I, myself, came in, from my
Speaker:CCNA. I mean, that's how I kinda got into it. I got
Speaker:into networks, and then I got into cybersecurity. And
Speaker:then it was around the time that, you know, the GPTs were really starting to
Speaker:hit their stride. And it was just part and parcel of it because
Speaker:I needed a good reference tool. And so then I learned, okay.
Speaker:Well, how does this work? How do how is it put together? How,
Speaker:you know, how is it all formed and such? How does
Speaker:it make its inferences? How does it understand the problems?
Speaker:So from that, I would say to anybody trying to get into this field,
Speaker:know cybersecurity first, and you will know AI
Speaker:in time. AI is in concept
Speaker:relatively simple, but the nuts and bolts of it are quite
Speaker:complex. So Yeah. The implementation
Speaker:details are quite severe. Like, I think
Speaker:AI is really, I think, better not better suited, but it came
Speaker:out of the lab. I think the paint is still wet. Paint hasn't dried
Speaker:yet. And now we're forcing it into an enterprise
Speaker:scenarios with real customers, real data, real people's lives.
Speaker:And I don't see a lot of the traditional security
Speaker:discipline that
Speaker:I would expect in modern era, modern development.
Speaker:And even that's a low bar. Even that's a low bar. Let's be real. Well,
Speaker:it's it's new. Right. It's very shiny.
Speaker:Mhmm. That's I think that's what I would say is the general
Speaker:populace and even in the industry that's quite I think our view is that this
Speaker:is a shiny thing. Right. Well, you know, well, I want
Speaker:to. You don't even know what it does. I still want it. I want it.
Speaker:What's interesting is, it
Speaker:reminds me a lot of the early days of the web where everybody wanted a
Speaker:website. Well, what are you gonna do with it? I don't know. I just want
Speaker:a website. You know? It's very it has very very
Speaker:similar vibe in that regard of we want it. We you know, the hell with
Speaker:the consequences. But the way I see this
Speaker:being,
Speaker:taken up as quickly as it is kind
Speaker:of worries me. Like, there's gonna be a day of reckoning, I
Speaker:think, coming. You know? And I thought we
Speaker:already have it. Right? You you had, there was a leak from Chat
Speaker:CPT. They had a 100 was a 100000 ish customers there, give or
Speaker:take? A 100000 credentials taken, compromised.
Speaker:Credentials and and presumably the data and the chats?
Speaker:Some of it potentially, I'm sure. But what we're looking at is, like,
Speaker:names, email addresses. I mean, it depends on how much you put in
Speaker:that profile. Remember, everything you put in that profile is stored.
Speaker:Right. Right. That is truly scary.
Speaker:So you mentioned network, Chuck. So you do you think that
Speaker:just on a personal level, it's
Speaker:what worries me about these offline models, right, you run OLAMA locally.
Speaker:Right? Do you think they could they call
Speaker:home? Could those be hijacked? Could those have problems?
Speaker:Specifically. Specifically. Like, so if I'm
Speaker:running Olama locally, right,
Speaker:how secure is that? Does that does that depend on the security of my
Speaker:network, or is there something in there that calls home?
Speaker:No. Not unless you tell it to. Not unless you try to extract it, you
Speaker:make a pull, then, yes, it does that. But that's the idea is that once
Speaker:it's pulled down, it kinda isolates itself. Now
Speaker:what you can do yourself is set up your
Speaker:network so that literally it has to be outbound,
Speaker:a stateful connection, originating outbound.
Speaker:And you can set that up in your firewall, physical
Speaker:or otherwise. And you can do things like that, and you can
Speaker:kind of put it to a point where it doesn't call home unless you tell
Speaker:it to. Right. And, also, once again, that
Speaker:private LLM is also very good because you control
Speaker:the access to what it does. So you can say,
Speaker:other than these addresses, sanitize it to the
Speaker:address of wherever the model comes from, say, these are the only ones
Speaker:allowed. Right. And nobody else is permitted.
Speaker:Otherwise, implicit deny. Right. So that's a I think
Speaker:a a small tangible example of something you
Speaker:can do that is relatively straightforward for any
Speaker:systems or network engineer, to do just in the hearing
Speaker:now. But in general, no. They don't normally call without
Speaker:prompting. Okay. But depends on what they do with those models.
Speaker:They might put in that kind of feature. A lot of that go back to
Speaker:the I'm sorry. Yeah. That's kind of my concern is, like, you know, would that
Speaker:end up in there? Or Well, Meta might put that in there.
Speaker:Right. Meta is a not alone. Meta is not
Speaker:exactly free. Right. Matt is not exactly,
Speaker:has a reputation for privacy. No.
Speaker:So it's kind of ironic that they are
Speaker:leading the effort in this space. Seems kind of an odd move.
Speaker:I I don't know what to say about that. No. No. No. I just need
Speaker:I have no thoughts on it, but Right. Right. Frankly, I don't I don't know
Speaker:how relevant it'd be to this discussion. But it's an interesting it's
Speaker:it's just an interesting time to be in this field, and,
Speaker:this is just fascinating that you can
Speaker:jailbreak. You could do this and, you know, even just the basics. Right?
Speaker:Like, you could do a DOS attack. Right? There's
Speaker:just basics too. Like, this is still
Speaker:an IT service no matter how cool it is, no matter futuristic it is. It's
Speaker:still an IT service, so it has all of those vulnerabilities,
Speaker:you know, that I don't know. Like, it's just it's just interesting. People are so
Speaker:focused in the new shiny. I just find it fascinating.
Speaker:And that's the thing is that this thing is a compounded problem. Right. You
Speaker:don't just have the usual suspects. You also have
Speaker:new things that are they
Speaker:by the virtue of them being new, there's not much
Speaker:investigation. There's not much study. I mean, amongst my
Speaker:research for this presentation, I found a number of
Speaker:papers, white papers coming from all sorts of universities.
Speaker:They are now looking into this. Right. This is something that maybe we
Speaker:should have done maybe a while back. Good thing, though, we're doing it now.
Speaker:Right. But also, also, there's a lot of reasons why you would do that, though.
Speaker:You would do that because in the wild, you'd be able to identify these things.
Speaker:Right. You'd be able to see. You're not gonna know everything when something gets released
Speaker:until it's put out into the wild. Right. And real users
Speaker:get their hands on it. Good actors, bad actors,
Speaker:and everything in the middle. Right? Like, you're not gonna yeah. No. I mean, it's
Speaker:kind of like I guess I guess in a perfect world, the cart would be
Speaker:before the horse in this case, but that's not the world we live in.
Speaker:Interesting. So where can
Speaker:people find out more about you and what you're up to? Well, you
Speaker:can find me on, LinkedIn. Kevin Lynch
Speaker:with CCNA. Cool. You can look up my company, Novi Tea Guy,
Speaker:Novi Tea Guy dot com. And For those outside the area,
Speaker:Nova stands for Northern Virginia. Just just wanna figure it out there. Well,
Speaker:also, it well, it's actually a bit of a it's a double meaning. At the
Speaker:time, I was dedicating myself to IT for the first time. I've done
Speaker:IT kind of side part of my work. So Nova is also the
Speaker:Latin for new. So I was Okay. The new IT guy. The
Speaker:new IT guy. But when it comes to IT, I'm still your guy even then.
Speaker:There you go. I love it. And,
Speaker:I'll definitely will include in the show notes a link to your presentation.
Speaker:And this has been a great conversation. I'd love to have you back and maybe
Speaker:do your presentation, maybe on a live stream or something like that if you're interested,
Speaker:and, I'll let Bailey finish the show. And that's
Speaker:a wrap for today's episode of the data driven podcast.
Speaker:A huge thank you to Kevin Latchford for shedding light on the vulnerabilities
Speaker:of large language models and how to stay one step ahead in the ever
Speaker:evolving world of IT security. Remember, while these
Speaker:models are brilliant at generating conversation, they aren't infallible
Speaker:so keep your digital guard up. Until next time, stay
Speaker:curious, stay safe and always question the source unless,
Speaker:of course, it's me. Cheers.