Safeguarding Data in AI Applications with Bytemonk

Article

Safeguarding Data in AI Applications with Bytemonk

Author

Bytemonk

Date

Jun 2, 2024

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, organizations are leveraging large language models (LLMs) to create innovative AI solutions such as chatbots and virtual assistants. Despite this rapid advancement, it’s essential for security teams and developers to prioritize the implementation of robust safeguards to protect both company and customer data.

Understanding AI Model Risks

Whether you’re utilizing public AI services from providers like OpenAI or Google, or hosting your own customized models such as LLAMA, it’s crucial to be aware of the associated risks. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has highlighted sensitive data exposure as a significant threat in AI usage, driven by the following factors:

Human Error: Instances where an employee or customer accidentally inputs sensitive information, such as credit card details or API keys, into the AI system. This data can then be transmitted to the LLM provider or stored in data pipelines, potentially being used in model training datasets.
Malicious Attacks: Various forms of attacks including prompt injection, data poisoning, and jailbreaking can compromise the security of AI systems.

To mitigate these risks, it’s imperative to ensure that AI model inputs and outputs are free from sensitive information like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Payment Card Information (PCI), Protected Health Information (PHI), secrets, and intellectual property.

Enhancing AI Security

One of the challenges at an enterprise level is the detection of sensitive data in AI interactions, often leading to numerous false positives. Thus, deploying a scanning tool with high recall and precision is crucial. Here’s a breakdown of these metrics:

1. Recall: Measures the number of relevant items successfully detected from a set of all relevant items.

2. Precision: Measures the accuracy of the detected items, ensuring that they are indeed relevant.

High recall and precision in data scanning tools allow security teams to identify sensitive data more accurately and address issues swiftly, minimizing false positives and reducing the risk of data breaches and noncompliance.

The Limitations of Common Solutions

Many organizations initially rely on regular expressions (regex) and open-source models to develop their data scanning solutions. However, these solutions often suffer from low precision rates, typically between 6%-30%. While large language models excel in text generation, they fall short in named entity recognition (NER), which is crucial for identifying sensitive data accurately.

Introducing AI Firewalls

The solution lies in deploying a firewall for AI. Think of it as a protective layer that ensures secure interactions between your AI systems and users. An effective AI firewall should prevent data leaks without disrupting customer interactions. For optimal performance, these firewalls need to maintain low latency (P99 <100ms) and a high request success rate (99.9%).

Beware of less advanced solutions offering “fail fast” features, which can indicate scalability issues and lead to missed detections and lower recall rates over time.

Key Features of an Effective AI Firewall

When developing AI applications, it’s crucial to integrate a firewall that offers superior sensitive data protection at scale.

At Bytemonk, our AI security solutions not only meet but exceed these standards, delivering unmatched recall, precision, and reliability for safeguarding sensitive data in AI models. Secure your AI with Bytemonk and protect your valuable data from emerging threats.

Conclusion

In summary, as AI applications like chatbots and virtual assistants become more widespread, safeguarding sensitive data is paramount. Understanding the risks associated with AI, such as human error and malicious attacks, and deploying high-precision scanning tools and AI firewalls are essential for effective protection. Bytemonk’s advanced AI security solutions offer superior precision, recall, and reliability, ensuring robust data protection without compromising performance. Trust Bytemonk to secure your AI applications and protect your valuable data from emerging threats.