Graves Distinguished Lecture Series in Cybersecurity: “Human-AI co-Teaming for Cybersecurity”

Please join us for Graves Distinguished lecture series guest speaker, Xinming Ou, Ph.D., professor of the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Computing at the University of South Florida on a presentation, “Human-AI co-Teaming for Cybersecurity: A Preliminary Case of Using Large Language Models in Software Pen-testing.”

Abstract: Large language models (LLM) presents potentials for automating security tasks. However, knowledge and skills for those tasks cannot always be found in documented natural language texts on which LLMs are trained. We investigate whether knowledge utilized in security tasks can be imparted to an LLM agent through human-AI co-teaming, where humans interact with an LLM to accomplish the tasks. As a first step towards evaluating this perceived potential, we experiment using LLMs in software pen-testing, where the main task is to automatically identify security vulnerabilities in source code. We examine whether an LLM-based AI agent can be improved over time for this security task as human operators interact with it by engineering prompts fed to the LLM based on its responses. Preliminary results show that this is a viable approach to building an AI agent for software pen-testing that can improve through repeated use.

Speaker Bio: Xinming Ou is professor of the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing at University of South Florida. He holds the directorship of Rapid7 Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab at USF. Prior to USF he was a faculty member at Kansas State University. Ou’s research focuses on human-centric approaches to cybersecurity, and has broad interests in applying AI techniques to improve cybersecurity operations. His research has been funded by National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, National Institute of Standards and Technology, HP Labs, and Rockwell Collins. He is a recipient of 2010 NSF CAREER Award, a three-time winner of HP Labs Innovation Research Program (IRP) award, and 2013 Kansas State University Frankenhoff Outstanding Research Award. Ou received Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University, and Bachelor and Masters degrees from Tsinghua University, both in computer science.