Microsoft Releases Counterfit. A Tool for Security Testing AI Systems

Below an outline of purpose, worth a look.

AI Security risk Assessment using Counterfit

Will Pearce AI Red Team Lead, Azure Trustworthy ML, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar Data Cowboy, Azure Trustworthy ML

Today, we are releasing Counterfit , an automation tool for security testing AI systems as an open-source project. Counterfit helps organizations conduct AI security risk assessments to ensure that the algorithms used in their businesses are robust, reliable, and trustworthy.

AI systems are increasingly used in critical areas such as healthcare, finance, and defense. Consumers must have confidence that the AI systems powering these important domains are secure from adversarial manipulation. For instance, one of the recommendations from Gartner’s Top 5 Priorities for Managing AI Risk Within Gartner’s MOST Framework published in Jan 20211 is that organizations “Adopt specific AI security measures against adversarial attacks to ensure resistance and resilience,” noting that “By 2024, organizations that implement dedicated AI risk management controls will successfully avoid negative AI outcomes twice as often as those that do not.”

However, performing security assessments of production AI systems is nontrivial. Microsoft surveyed 28 organizations, spanning Fortune 500 companies, governments, non-profits, and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), to understand the current processes in place to secure AI systems. We found that 25 out of 28 businesses indicated they don’t have the right tools in place to secure their AI systems and that security professionals are looking for specific guidance in this space.

This tool was born out of our own need to assess Microsoft’s AI systems for vulnerabilities with the goal of proactively securing AI services, in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE) initiative. Counterfit started as a corpus of attack scripts written specifically to target individual AI models, and then morphed into a generic automation tool to attack multiple AI systems at scale.

Today, we routinely use Counterfit as part of our AI red team operations. We have found it helpful to automate techniques in MITRE’s Adversarial ML Threat Matrix and replay them against Microsoft’s own production AI services to proactively scan for AI-specific vulnerabilities. Counterfit is also being piloted in the AI development phase to catch vulnerabilities in AI systems before they hit production.... "