ARLINGTON, Va. – Researchers at Lockheed Martin Corp. are joining a U.S. military project to develop new ways of assessing the vulnerabilities of military artificial intelligence (AI) to enemy cyber attack.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced a $4.7 million contract last month to the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill, N.J., for the for the Securing Artificial Intelligence for Battlefield Effective Robustness (SABER) project.
Lockheed Martin joins the BAE Systems Electronic Systems segment in Merrimack, N.H., on the SABER project. BAE Systems won a $3.9 million SABER contract in early February.
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.
Counter-AI techniques
To rectify this, Lockheed Martin and 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.
AI cyber vulnerabilities
For the SABER project, Lockheed Martin and 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 Lockheed Martin and 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 Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories online at www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/research-labs/advanced-technology-labs.html, BAE Systems Electronic Systems at www.baesystems.com/en-us/who-we-are/electronic-systems, or DARPA at www.darpa.mil/research/programs/saber-securing-artificial-intelligence.
