Tag Archives: taxonomies

Taxonomy of Generative AI Misuse

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/taxonomy-of-generative-ai-misuse.html

Interesting paper: “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data”:

Generative, multimodal artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative potential across industries, but its misuse poses significant risks. Prior research has shed light on the potential of advanced AI systems to be exploited for malicious purposes. However, we still lack a concrete understanding of how GenAI models are specifically exploited or abused in practice, including the tactics employed to inflict harm. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of GenAI misuse tactics, informed by existing academic literature and a qualitative analysis of approximately 200 observed incidents of misuse reported between January 2023 and March 2024. Through this analysis, we illuminate key and novel patterns in misuse during this time period, including potential motivations, strategies, and how attackers leverage and abuse system capabilities across modalities (e.g. image, text, audio, video) in the wild.

Blog post. Note the graphic mapping goals with strategies.

A Taxonomy of Access Control

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/a-taxonomy-of-access-control.html

My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once it’s explained, but no one has thought of it before. I can’t believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Ittay Eyal laid it out in this paper. The paper is about cryptocurrency wallet design, but the ideas are more general. Ittay points out that a key—or an account, or anything similar—can be in one of four states:

safe Only the user has access,
loss No one has access,
leak Both the user and the adversary have access, or
theft Only the adversary has access.

Once you know these states, you can assign probabilities of transitioning from one state to another (someone hacks your account and locks you out, you forgot your own password, etc.) and then build optimal security and reliability to deal with it. It’s a truly elegant way of conceptualizing the problem.