The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has launched a new funding program launched: The project is seeking IT security solutions based on artificial intelligence. Project outlines can be submitted until March 29, 2019.
The funding is aimed at researching and developing new IT security solutions based on AI techniques. The solutions and techniques should be designed to be as intuitive as possible and suitable for use in a variety of application contexts.
The focus is on AI-supported IT security solutions with limited resources, solutions for network security and the further development of AI-supported IT security solutions.
AI-supported IT security solutions with limited resources
Companies must protect their information, communication and production systems as best as possible against cyberattacks in order to counteract the risk of possible economic damage and reputational loss, as well as to meet security-related certification requirements and comply with legal regulations.
Therefore, projects on the following research aspects are supported:
- IT security solutions with easy-to-use AI components so that good results can be achieved even if the user has little knowledge of the procedures.
- Self-learning security systems that deliver good attack detection rates based on smaller amounts of data, such as those commonly found in SMEs.
- Solutions that enable cross-company use of learning and training data while ensuring data protection and without disclosing security-relevant information.
AI-powered IT security solutions for network security
Many attacks can be detected at the communication nodes on the internet, through which both the attacker's commands and control commands and the data of the attacked party are transmitted. However, for a meaningful analysis, examining a single node is often insufficient. Instead, a coordinated investigation of many distributed nodes is required. At the same time, the rapid networking through the Internet of Things is increasing the diversity of devices communicating with each other.
The funding is therefore aimed at researching and developing new, innovative IT security solutions that are capable of deriving information about the threat situation from heterogeneous, distributed data sets, making (partially) automated decisions regarding necessary defensive measures while taking into account human intervention options, and predicting impending attacks as accurately as possible.
Further development of AI-supported solutions for IT security
In addition to analyzing communication data, there are other ways to detect and prevent cyberattacks. One is to evaluate the security quality of software and hardware using self-learning systems, for example, through intelligent automated testing. However, machine learning methods are generally not transparent regarding the features actually learned.
The aim of the funding under this directive is therefore, among other things:
- The development of transparent security technologies using new AI methods. These are to be demonstrated and evaluated using a demonstrator.
- Improved detection of attacks on learning system-based IT security solutions will be demonstrated and evaluated using practical examples.
- New approaches for generating synthetic training data to improve the decision quality of self-learning IT security systems. These are to be demonstrated and evaluated in practice.
Interested teams have until March 29, 2019, to submit a project outline.
Further information on the application and the conditions of participation.
