Let AI Drive Compliance and Provisioning in Your Identity Journey

What might once have seemed impossible is rapidly becoming reality thanks to growing developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Developers are finding new use cases for AI in many different applications and industries, including Identity and Access Management (IAM) and cybersecurity. If you've been looking for a way to enhance your security posture and keep up with the ever-evolving threat landscape, we can help. Let's explore how AI and your identity journey can go hand in hand. 

The Technological Progression of AI — An Overview

To understand where AI is going, it's important to explore where it's been. Let's take a look at how AI has changed since its inception and where it could be headed in the next few years:

1. Rule-based AI: One of the original iterations, a rule-based AI is extremely simple — it consists of a structured set of rules that lead to predetermined outcomes. These systems are immutable and unscalable, only capable of executing the tasks defined in their programming.
2. Context awareness: Context-aware AI can retain information from previous interactions, which provides the context for future responses. This capability eliminates the need to continuously repeat yourself in your prompts, creating a smoother and more personalized user experience.
3. Domain-specific mastery: This AI can understand and retain context, but it also has the tools to rapidly become an expert within a specific field. Google's DeepMind AlphaGo AI, for instance, was designed specifically to master the highly complex Chinese board game Go.
4. Generative AI: Generative AI models — such as ChatGPT, DALL-E and Google's Bard — are a bit more human-like in their capacity for thinking and reasoning. Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning enable these models to comprehend complex concepts and use that information to generate creative solutions to new problems.

While we've only just entered Stage Four with generative AI models exploding into the mainstream, experts are already forecasting about what's next. It's uncertain what exactly the next stages of AI could look like. Its growing presence in our everyday lives, however, has the potential to benefit us in various ways we may never have previously imagined.

Current Events and Developments in AI

While the Singularity is highly speculative and still just science fiction, it's impossible to deny the enormous impact AI will have on our world moving forward — not to mention the impact it's already made. Cautionary tales about rogue AI and privacy violations are abundant, but AI has so many promising applications in business, computing and more. 

In terms of cybersecurity, AI has applications for both malicious actors and companies looking to cover their vulnerabilities. For example, hackers could use generative AI programs to create convincing phishing emails that are more difficult to detect than those written by humans. To combat this kind of threat, a company could use ML algorithms to quickly identify threats once they enter their network, significantly reducing potential losses. 

However, we're sure to see things change rapidly over the coming years. 

How Leveraging AI for Defense Can Improve Your Security Posture

So how can AI enhance cybersecurity techniques like IAM and Privileged Access Management (PAM)? It all comes down to Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a computer program's ability to understand human language and produce an appropriate response. NLP is a foundational element of generative AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E, which take written inputs and produce new content that matches what the user prompted.

Some possible IAM use cases for this technology include:

• Generative policy creation: You could enforce strong password policies by prompting a generative AI model to create an expression for a policy that is in violation if a user fails to change their password after 30 days. Further prompting the AI to explain the policy would result in a thorough breakdown of each line of code, allowing you to check its work.
• Flagging inactive accounts: To identify dormant or orphaned accounts, you could prompt a generative AI to create a policy that is in violation if a user's last Active Directory login was 45 or more days ago. 
• Identifying entitlement outliers: The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is critical for minimizing the risk of both malicious and unintentional insider threats. You could prompt an AI to review specific user accounts and flag any entitlements they possess that do not match their role, team or department.
• Detecting rehires: When an employee leaves your company, their identity never truly gets deleted from your system — it simply changes state. The same goes for when they return to your company. An AI could create a policy expression that automatically reactivates and restores a rehire's access permissions to save time for your IT and HR departments.
• Identifying unusual requests: An AI model could analyze typical behavior patterns for your users and flag anomalies if any are present. Additionally, it could automatically remediate these requests by activating access management techniques like step-up authentication and workflow approvals. 

A professional can help you determine how AI might work with your organization's network, which can help you maximize your investment. 

Planning Your AI Voyage — Start With Design

To implement a successful AI cybersecurity strategy, you need to start from the ground up. Data discovery is an essential first step because it unlocks the power of all your organization's data, including datasets you may not have even known about. Once you are sure you know all your datasets, you can begin planning for real. 

You'll first want to determine what decisions you'll allow your AI model to make from your data set. As we mentioned earlier, privacy is a real concern with unregulated AI, so you'll need to be careful if you intend to use it on datasets containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), like HR records or data from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Additionally, consider what role Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) will play in your strategy. 

Enhance Your Security Strategy With Advanced Solutions From Bravura Security

If your organization needs to step up its IAM or PAM strategies, you can count on us. The Bravura Security Fabric, our fully integrated access control solution, provides end-to-end protection for enterprises and large corporations. With fully configurable capabilities and services, you can tailor it to your organization's environment, creating an effective shield against would-be attackers from any angle. And advanced security automation helps combat automated attacks, so your system is protected from AI threats.

Schedule a live demo today to see our solutions in action, and feel free to contact us online with any questions.