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Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

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Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#12
post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides.

It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "risk score" but it's very hard and a model is going to potentially be better at it.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#13
post #11

Zero trust is deterministic. AI is non-deterministic Non-deterministic access controls is Terrible idea

I completely agree.

I think LLMs may have a role in security posture, specifically flagging/identifying potential threats for human review. But a Zero Trust/Access Controls should be a HARD boundary, not an inconsistent one.

The problem we have right now is that there are some legitimately interesting ideas out there for things we could be using LLMs for, but we also have a ton of "I have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail" going on too.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#15
post #2

Oh yeah, a company whose business model is taking everyone’s data and selling it is going to help me secure my data. I guess there’s one born every minute…

This trope is so tiring. There is a massive difference between Google for enterprise customers and Google for consumers. The consumer offering is massively subsidized by ads and will use your data for ad placement, although they still never sell your data because that would hurt their business. The Enterprise offering guarantees you contractually that they never touch your data.

Except if the authorities anywhere in the world or valuable partners politely ask for it, yeah.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#16
post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

Non of it really matters if the end product is just going to be ignored because there's zero people who want to be the guard in the panopticon and therefore, it'll still be given to an AI to watch and make it's dumb decisions about how trust worthy you are to do X, Y and Z.

Even if the middle is deterministic, if one end is just going to be lazily hooked up to an AI, it's the shitty dystopian future.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#17
post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

The engineer could be fixing an emergency issue while on vacation. For financial data, that would hopefully be an auto-deny anyway until someone on-site whitelists their IP. And this is if they aren't using VPNs. Adding AI to this party feels like it wouldn't really help.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#18
post #11

Zero trust is deterministic. AI is non-deterministic Non-deterministic access controls is Terrible idea

I completely agree. I think LLMs may have a role in security posture, specifically flagging/identifying potential threats for human review . But a Zero Trust/Access Controls should be a HARD boundary, not an inconsistent one. The problem we have right now is that there are some legitimately interesting ideas out there for things we could be using LLMs for, but we also have a ton of "I have a hammer, and everything lo…

> The problem we have right now is that there are some legitimately interesting ideas out there for things we could be using LLMs for, but we also have a ton of "I have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail" going on too.

It's not a problem as much as a phase the world is going through. LLMs are a technological breakthrough in the same generality class as the Internet, or possibly electricity, and in both cases the world went through a phase of attempting to apply the newfound invention to literally everything. It's a necessary phase, when a technology obviously could be useful for everything, but it's not obvious whether it will in practice.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trope is so tiring. There is a massive difference between Google for enterprise customers and Google for consumers. The consumer offering is massively subsidized by ads and will use your data for ad placement, although they still never sell your data because that would hurt their business. The Enterprise offering guarantees you contractually that they never touch your data.

Except if the authorities anywhere in the world or valuable partners politely ask for it, yeah.

Or if they eventually get "SOTA" AI and it breaks out of it's sandbox trying to do whatever the MBA has told it to do.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#20
post #7
post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

Just to make my point: can I really trust humans to keep up with the required identity data that will give me enough "credibility" so the AI will give me access? Let's say I had a promotion, who changes my title in the system, who changes my responsibilities and my place in the org chart, more importantly, will they do it or is on leave and forgot? those are data points required by the agent to determine if I'm "good…

I think the dynamic risk signals is already an assumed part of the system. The proposal here seems to be shrinking the trust boundary from "can Alice use Google Drive?" to "should this specific read/write/export API call on this specific resource be allowed right now?"

So yeah you're right in that it does add more probabilistic randomness just by virtue of changing the boundary of when the permission gate kicks in

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