U.S. research security requires trust and collaboration between those conducting R&D and the federal government. Most R&D takes place in the private sector, outside of government authority and control, and researchers are wary of federal government or law enforcement involvement in their work. Despite these challenges, as adversaries work to extract science, technology, data and know-how from the United States, the U.S. government is pursuing an ambitious research security initiative. In order to secure the 78 percent of U.S. R&D funded outside the government, authors Melissa Flagg and Zachary Arnold propose a new, public-private research security clearinghouse, with leadership from academia, business, philanthropy, and government and a presence in the most active R&D hubs across the United States.

As states turn to AI to gain an edge in cyber competition, it will change the cat-and-mouse game between cyber attackers and defenders. Embracing machine learning systems for cyber defense could drive more aggressive and destabilizing engagements between states. Wyatt Hoffman writes that cyber competition already has the ingredients needed for escalation to real-world violence, even if these ingredients have yet to come together in the right conditions.

In the syndicated public radio program "Here & Now," CSET's Director of CyberAI, Ben Buchanan, explains what happened in the SolarWinds cyber attack.

Director of CSET's Cybersecurity and AI project Ben Buchanan questions the intent of the 2020 cyberespionage campaign.

Machine learning systems’ vulnerabilities are pervasive. Hackers and adversaries can easily exploit them. As such, managing the risks is too large a task for the technology community to handle alone. In this primer, Andrew Lohn writes that policymakers must understand the threats well enough to assess the dangers that the United States, its military and intelligence services, and its civilians face when they use machine learning.

“Cyberoperations are almost ordinary, they happen every single day. This threat is constant. Nearly everyone is on the front lines of this global competition, not just the big players," said Director of CSET's Cybersecurity and AI Project Ben Buchanan. Buchanan notes that nation-state hacking is a part of the new era of espionage.

Based on an in-depth analysis of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, the authors consider the future of applying such systems to cyber attacks, and what strategies attackers are likely or less likely to use. As nuanced, complex, and overhyped as machine learning is, they argue, it remains too important to ignore.

As demand for cybersecurity experts in the United States has grown faster than the supply of qualified workers, some organizations have turned to artificial intelligence to bolster their overwhelmed cyber teams. Organizations may opt for distinct teams that specialize exclusively in AI or cybersecurity, but there is a benefit to having employees with overlapping experience in both domains. This data brief analyzes hiring demand for individuals with a combination of AI and cybersecurity skills.

CSET Founding Director Jason Matheny presented the keynote address at the virtual colloquium on the future of data science and the implications for privacy and national security hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.