I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of 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.
I have many worries about what AI means for our field, for various definitions of “field”. But in this post I want to focus on just one thing I’ve started worrying about, and it’s a perverse thing: specifically, I’m concerned that AI is going to make software much too secure.
While that doesn’t sound so bad on the surface, there’s a consequence to this. I mean something very specific: I’m concerned that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about to go dark, meaning: that they’re going to suddenly lose a huge portion of their capability. And that this isn’t going to be simply a problem for those agencies, but also for those of us who value computer security and privacy in general.
