BAE Systems to help defend military artificial intelligence (AI) from data poisoning and cyber attack

ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers needed new ways of assessing the vulnerabilities of military artificial intelligence (AI) to enemy cyber attack. They found a solution from The BAE Systems Electronic Systems segment in Merrimack, N.H.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced a $3.9 million contract to BAE Systems earlier this month for the Securing Artificial Intelligence for Battlefield Effective Robustness (SABER) project.

Today there are no ways to assesses deployed military AI-enabled systems for their vulnerabilities to cyber attack, DARPA officials warn; the security risks of AI-enabled battlefield systems remain unknown.

Assessing battlefield AI

To rectify this, BAE Systems engineers will develop counter-AI techniques, tools, and technical competency to assess AI-enabled battlefield systems.

AI technology has reached a level of maturity sufficient to integrate the technology into U.S. military systems, and could give battlefield advantage by helping improve the speed, quality, and accuracy of decision-making while enabling machine autonomy and automation.

Yet AI has been shown a vulnerability to an adversary's taking control of its data input, which can lead to data poisoning, physically constrained adversarial patches for evasion, and model stealing attacks.

Potential vulnerabilities

For the SABER project, BAE Systems will assess the potential vulnerabilities of AI-enabled autonomous ground and aerial systems that could be deployed within the next one to three years.

DARPA experts want BAE Systems to develop physical, adversarial AI, cyber security, and electronic warfare (EW) techniques to perform these AI cyber vulnerability assessments. More SABER contracts may be awarded.

For more information contact BAE Systems Electronic Systems online at www.baesystems.com/en-us/who-we-are/electronic-systems/countermeasure-and-electromagnetic-attack-solutions, or DARPA at www.darpa.mil/research/programs/saber-securing-artificial-intelligence.