THALES PRESENTS ENHANCED SECURITY SOLUTIONS FOR MILITARY AND CIVIL AI

• 24 Nov 2023
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

The Friendly Hackers team from Thales, a world leader in data protection and cybersecurity, has won the CAID[1] challenge organised by the French Ministry of Defence2 during the fifth edition of European Cyber Week in France (November 21 – 23, 2023).

The challenge, the first of its kind to be organised by the French Ministry of Defence, was designed to evaluate the extent to which teams of hackers could exploit certain intrinsic vulnerabilities of AI models.

Thales's work on AI security and trust is aligned with the requirements of both the defence community and civilian organisations such as critical infrastructure providers, which all face the same challenges of protecting their training datasets and intellectual property, and guaranteeing that AI-generated results can be trusted for critical decision-making.

As the Group's defence and security businesses address critical requirements, often with safety-of-life implications, Thales has developed an ethical and scientific framework for the development of trusted AI based on the four strategic pillars of validity, security, explainability and responsibility. Thales solutions combine the know-how of over 300 senior AI experts and more than 4,500 cybersecurity specialists with the operational expertise of the Group's aerospace, land defence, naval defence, space and other defence and security businesses.

Thales has developed the technical capabilities needed to test the security of AI algorithms and neural network architectures, detect vulnerabilities and propose effective countermeasures. Thales's Friendly Hackers team based at the ThereSIS laboratory at Palaiseau was one of about a dozen teams taking part in the AI challenge, and achieved first place on both tasks.

The Thales ITSEF (Information Technology Security Evaluation Facility) is accredited by the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to conduct pre-certification security evaluations. During European Cyber Week, the ITSEF team also presented the first project of its kind in the world aimed at compromising the decisions of an embedded AI by exploiting the electromagnetic radiation of its processor.

Thales's cybersecurity consulting and audit teams make these tools and methodologies available to customers wishing to develop their own AI models or establish a framework for the use and training of commercial models.