With the rapid rise of applications leveraging generative AI (GenAI) to innovate faster, there is a pressing need for infrastructure that can support scalable, secure, and cost-efficient computing and storage solutions. These applications require high-performance servers and sophisticated algorithms to generate various forms of content, including images, music, and text. As a result, many organizations are increasingly adopting cloud computing as their primary platform.

Cloud computing infrastructure, while convenient, often has hidden vulnerabilities due to the complex computing processes of GenAI-enabled applications. Adversaries can easily exploit these vulnerabilities if proper guardrails are not in place. This necessitates the adoption of "shift-left" security strategy, prioritizing activities that protect the artificial Intelligence (AI) systems lifecycle in the cloud from the very start and throughout every stage of development and deployment.

Proactive approach - Why the urgency?

The stakes are high with GenAI. Gartner's recent findings reveal that 41% of organizations have already experienced an AI privacy breach or security incident – with over half stemming from internal data compromises. The explosive growth of this technology will only escalate these risks. Given that GenAI models often process sensitive data and generate highly impactful outputs, a single breach can have far-reaching, damaging consequences. Robust, proactive security within their backend platform is the most effective way to mitigate these threats.

Before diving into the control measures, here’s a breakdown of key attack vectors to watch out for:

1. Data-Targeted Attacks: These attacks corrupt or exploit data used in model development. Adversaries may introduce bias, impair performance, steal training data, or conduct inference attacks.

2. Model-Targeted Attacks: These attacks directly focus on GenAI models and include techniques like model inversion (reconstructing training data from outputs), model extraction (stealing a proprietary model), and inputs designed to trick the model and cause it to make errors.

3. Infrastructure-Targeted Attacks: These exploits take advantage of traditional cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the resource pipeline, including outdated systems, network misconfigurations, storage leaks, or overprivileged permissions.

4. Supply Chain Attacks: These attacks target dependencies in application development, exploiting open-source libraries, malware injections, and vulnerabilities in third-party services used by GenAI applications.

5. Social Engineering and Insider Threats: These are the types of attacks that exploit human vulnerabilities. Attackers may use phishing to trick users into revealing login information or gain unauthorized access to applications or cloud infrastructure.

Proactive Measures as a Solution

These security measures are not merely beneficial – they're essential.  Minimizing downtime, safeguarding data, ensuring optimal performance, and protecting your projects depends on it.  It's worthwhile to explore various defense mechanisms and integrate them into GenAI-served applications from the outset.

These measures aren't limited to the ones below, but they provide a strong starting point:

Zero Trust Architecture: Continuously authenticate and authorize all users, devices, and workloads, even within your internal cloud network. This mitigates data, model, and infrastructure attacks by reducing the impact of breaches and limiting the scope of attacks. 

Cloud Infrastructure Security: Design computing workloads using serverless or ephemeral containers to minimize attack surfaces and supplement it with confidential computing for sensitive data processing and code integrity. Implement automation for recurrent workflows and use encryption for both data in rest and in transit. Explore immutable storage solutions to prevent unauthorized changes to training data and model checkpoints.

Supply Chain Security: Implement robust MLOps practices to build secure pipelines from the ground up. Analyze dependencies for vulnerabilities and integrate security at every development stage (including code reviews, threat modeling, and secure coding training). This proactive approach must extend to your cloud environment as well. Conduct due diligence on cloud providers and third-party services, ensuring their security standards align with yours. Enforce logging and monitoring throughout the supply chain for comprehensive visibility.

Threat Modeling: Go beyond traditional threat modeling and focus specifically on how attackers can target GenAI systems (e.g., data poisoning, model extraction, and adversarial attacks). Analyze data movement throughout your pipeline to identify potential targets and implement a continuous threat modeling approach.

Continuous Assessments & Improvement: Avoid a "set it and forget it" mindset. Perform automated security scans on infrastructure, code, images, and dependencies. Conduct penetration tests and pipeline evaluations. Integrate cloud-native security tools (firewalls, WAFs, and, IDS/IPS) for defense and alerts.

Security Training for xPA Teams: Train developers and researchers on secure coding practices and a security-first mindset. Emphasize the unique risks of GenAI, including data protection and understanding novel attack methods, further empowering them to play a key role in incident response.

Conclusion

As GenAI revolutionizes industries, robust cloud security is no longer optional – it's the foundation upon which innovation rests. When GenAI outputs inform critical decisions, the integrity of your models and data becomes paramount for both compliance and trust. These proactive security strategies provide a framework that can be adapted to harden your cloud infrastructure and support these applications. Always think like an attacker, proactively seeking vulnerabilities from development to deployment, to keep your GenAI innovations safe and reliable for the future ahead.

To learn more about GenAI visit RSAC Marketplace where you can find a wide range of cybersecurity vendors and service providers who can assist with your specific needs.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely the author's and do not represent those of their employer.