Everything is about to “go dark”

I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaining to colleagues why Baltimore isn’t actually like The Wire. And second: trying not to talk about AI.

Here I’m going to break both of those rules. Because frankly, I am worried about what AI means for our field. My fear isn’t that AIs are going to make software insecure. Rather, my biggest concern is that maybe they’ll do the opposite. More concretely, I’m worried that thanks to AI vulnerability scanning, a number of things about to go dark. And by dark, I mean something very specific: I’m concerned that U. S.

intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about to lose a huge portion of their capability.