EAGER: SaTC AI-Cybersecurity: Faking It: Facilitating Public Awareness of Cybersecurity Issues in AI

The lack of a strong public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies represents both a threat to national security and an opportunity for the development of new approaches to cybersecurity education and research. The project intends to develop and support a series of publicly accessible AI challenge competitions aimed at facilitating the public’s understanding of AI technologies and cybersecurity.

All challenges will additionally serve as large-scale data collection platforms, assisting researchers in better understanding the trustworthiness and interpretability of AI systems. Project plans include creating lesson plans and challenges designed simultaneously to broaden understanding of cybersecurity issues in AI and provide an on-ramp for students interested in AI and cybersecurity across K-12 and higher education.

Overall, the project team hopes to contribute to and scale ongoing efforts to develop and administer freely available online curricula that fosters public awareness of AI.

There is a clear and urgent need to connect research, education, and workforce development efforts at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of AI and machine learning challenges, as well as the rapid development and adoption of AI technologies. This project will address these urgent challenges through the following research questions: First, how do individuals identify trustworthy AI systems and outputs?

Second, how do AI/Cybersecurity concepts align with current educational standards? Last, how can public understanding and trust of AI be enhanced further? To answer these questions, the project will develop scaffolded challenges at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI entitled “Deeperfakes” and “P0150N”.

The project team will work with the non-profit AI Education Project, working specifically to include modules on deep fakes and the role of AI in the cybersecurity workforce. The Deeperfakes challenges will ask participants to verify a series of AI-generated images and media, explaining their reasoning for either accepting or rejecting various media as real or fabricated.

Similarly, the P0150N challenges will pit students against simple AI systems modeling those that detect denial of service attacks. This will allow students to experiment with mechanisms to poison the AI and successfully carry out an attack. The challenges will also serve as data collection tools and produce a large, open dataset for AI and cybersecurity research.

This dataset will provide AI and cybersecurity researchers with information on how people read “faked” algorithmic media as real or fabricated.

This project is supported by a special initiative of the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program to foster new, previously unexplored, collaborations between the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and education. The SaTC program aligns with the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan and the National Privacy Research Strategy to protect and preserve the growing social and economic benefits of cyber systems while ensuring security and privacy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.