AI Integrity: The Invisible Threat Organizations Can't Ignore

"AI systems are increasingly making decisions that impact people, processes, and businesses. But what if the models they're based on are no longer reliable? AI integrity is about protecting the core of artificial intelligence: the data, algorithms, and interactions that determine how a model thinks and acts. And it is precisely this integrity that is under threat from a new wave of cyberattacks. So-called integrity attacks are a growing threat that undermines the reliability of AI models, with potentially far-reaching consequences for businesses and society."

"In a prompt injection attack, the attacker manipulates an AI model by adding hidden instructions to seemingly innocuous text, such as a calendar invitation or document. Once the AI ​​gains access to that source, it can unintentionally leak confidential information. Such vulnerabilities demonstrate that even seemingly secure integrations between AI and office applications can pose risks. Even more troubling is model poisoning: manipulating a model through contaminated training data. Just 0.001% of corrupted data can be enough to influence the outcomes of an AI system."

AI integrity refers to the reliability of AI models and their underlying algorithms, including data, model weights, and interactions. Integrity can be compromised by developer mistakes or malicious attacks such as prompt injection, model poisoning, and labeling attacks. Prompt injection embeds hidden instructions in innocuous documents, risking unintended data leaks from integrated sources. Model poisoning can alter outcomes with extremely small amounts of corrupted training data (as little as 0.001%). Infected AI agents can propagate malicious influence to other agents, analogous to disinformation spread. Labeling attacks deliberately misclassify training examples, teaching incorrect associations and causing dangerous real-world errors. Strong data provenance, secure integrations, monitoring, and adversarial validation are necessary to preserve integrity.

Read at Techzine Global