AI PCs might solve a real problem: The 'friction' that sees users ignore security
- Reference: 1717682411
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/06/06/trend_micro_ai_pc_security/
- Source link:
As explained to The Register by Trend's veep for product management Eric Shulze at Computex in Taiwan today, the company's email security tools use a cloud-hosted AI model that scans messages to detect threats. Uploading messages to that model is an act that means Trend Micro must comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which it does by presenting a popup that asks for users' approval.
Infosec types describe that sort of popup as a source of "friction" because it means users are being asked to make a choice about their security and can't be relied on to choose wisely. Sometimes, friction causes users to opt out of services entirely – they can't be bothered clicking on anything other than a button that makes popups go away forever. If they make that choice for cloudy email scanning, friction has therefore seen them opt out of a service designed to protect them.
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As such, Trend Micro has adapted the AI model used in its cloud to run locally on AI PCs – machines that include a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of handling at least 40 trillion operations a second (TOPS).
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If Trend's software is running, incoming emails are assessed by that model. And because the model runs locally, there's no need to seek users' permission.
Shulze thinks that's a win because it reduces resistance, meaning users might not opt out of having their emails assessed.
[4]The definition of an AI PC is now even muddier, helping no-one – not even AIs
[5]We're the Ryzen force in CPUs for AI PCs: AMD
[6]Intel details how Lunar Lake PC chips deliver 120 TOPS
[7]Millions forced to use brain as OpenAI's ChatGPT takes morning off
AI PCs can scan mails without working up a sweat, he added, showing The Register a Windows utility that tracks CPU load, and which now also tracks NPUs. The latter showed occasional brief and small spikes of activity – each representing a scan of a single incoming email.
The NPU was otherwise idle – as you'd expect on a vendor's demo machine. But Shulze said Trend Micro doesn't see much competition for NPU resources at present – it seems buyers of AI PCs, or Copilot+ PCs, or whatever they are called aren't yet running many apps that require NPUs.
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Trend's update also monitors attacks on AI applications. Shulze outlined a scenario in which malware could attack a local model by inserting text such as the wrong address for a bank's website – mybank.com instead of the real site bank.com – in the hope that users visit the first site and fall for a phishing lure.
The company intends to deliver this tech in its consumer-grade desktop products "in late 2024." There's no word on when business users might enjoy the same protections. ®
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Re: Back to front
But it is better than uploading your personal email data to a cloud somewhere, with *both* who and where-knows data retention. No thanks. Never, ever. So if its "download and scan locally" or "allow scan before download by unknown agents", I'll take "Download and scan locally" for $1000, Alex.
Re: Back to front
This is a consumer product so the goalposts are different.
For businesses I agree, it sounds entirely useless, the scanning would be carried out on the mail server and the decision about whether to train a LLM with corporate e-mails would be made by the company, not the end user.
Re: Back to front
The "end user" isn't manually downloading the email. The mail client is, and it could be programmed to keep it in some type of special quarantine zone until the scan is complete and then it is passed to the "main" client where the user can see and interact with it.
AI Micro security in “the cloud”
> Trend Micro has outlined how it will tailor its desktop security software for AI PCs, and thinks it might improve security in ways that normal, bog-standard PCs can't match.
Why don't they just fix the defects in the OS platform?
Oh dear ...
" the company's email security tools use a cloud-hosted AI model that scans messages to detect threats. Uploading messages to that model is an act that means Trend Micro must comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation "
Unless the description leaves something important out, this sounds weird. If it's a consumer tool, uploading emails to it (presumably by said consumer) lies entirely outside the GDPR, which only applies to businesses processing personal data. If it's a business tool, the business doing the uploading would be the party to which the regulation applies, so no 'pop-up' from Trend would be relevant. Perhaps they just mean that the service (wherever hosted) must comply with the 'adequacy' provision (or warn that it doesn't), but yet again that would only be applicable if a business were to use the service. In that case it'd be neater simply to have an EU-based replicate service that thus automatically complied.
So there seem to be quite a few simple alternative ways to solve the supposed problem without resorting to local execution of the service. My guess is that this is yet another attempt to shoehorn "AI" into a product line, and it would seem to limit (or weaken) the robustness of the tests available, as nobody but an idiot would do sandboxed live testing of attachments on the target machine.
Back to front
This seems rather backwards - you don't want an end-user to download an email to their machine and only then scan it for malware - you want to block it well before it gets anywhere close to their mailbox. And you definitely don't want end-users making security decisions at all.