Military researchers eye project to assess vulnerabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to cyber attack
ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are crafting a project to assess the vulnerabilities of military artificial intelligence (AI) programs to enemy cyber attack.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., served notice last week (DARPA-SN-25-39) of the upcoming Securing Artificial Intelligence for Battlefield Effective Robustness (SABER) project.
No known solution
There is no known reported ecosystem that operationally assesses deployed military AI-enabled systems for their vulnerabilities to cyber attack, DARPA officials warn. As a result, the so the theoretical adversarial AI attacks have not been practically demonstrated in operational settings.
The bottom line: the operational security risks of AI-enabled battlefield systems remain unknown.
To rectify this, the DARPA SABER project seeks to build an AI research group equipped with the necessary counter-AI techniques, tools, and technical competency to assess AI-enabled battlefield systems.
AI technology has reached a level of maturity sufficient to integrate the technology into U.S. military systems. AI could give battlefield advantage by helping improve the speed, quality, and accuracy of decision-making while enabling autonomy and assistive automation.
Adversary control
Yet AI has been shown a vulnerability to an adversary's taking control of its data input, which can lead to data poisoning, physically constrained adversarial patches for evasion, and model stealing attacks.
DARPA has not yet released a formal SABER solicitation. Should the project move forward, the SABER research team would assess the potential vulnerabilities of AI-enabled autonomous ground and aerial systems that could be deployed within the next one to three years.
If continued, the SABER program would seek contractors to assist in surveying, evaluating, selecting, developing, and employing state-of-the-art physical, adversarial AI, cyber security, and electronic warfare (EW) techniques to perform these cyber vulnerability assessments of AI-enabled systems. The SABER program manager would be Lt. Col. Nathaniel Bastian.
Email questions or concerns to DARPA at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/405db5405f6b4d58862f4761788034fb/view.
John Keller | Editor-in-Chief
John Keller is the Editor-in-Chief, Military & Aerospace Electronics Magazine--provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronics and optoelectronic technologies in military, space and commercial aviation applications. John has been a member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since 1989 and chief editor since 1995.
