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Secure LLMs and AI for Your Business

At this stage, organizations are exploring the capabilities of LLMs through hands-on experimentation. Most commonly they employ model-as-a-service APIs and manual processes instead of monitoring or advanced deployment strategies.


Employees use tools for an array of tasks, including email responders, customer support services, meeting summarization and legal document analysis. Unknowingly, these employees may enter confidential data into these tools.


Maturity Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence have become indispensable tools in modern business processes, helping enhance everything from customer service and data analytics to content production and decision-making. But, their incorporation into enterprise workflows comes with inherent security risks that must be considered and mitigated against.


AI technologies handle huge volumes of sensitive information, making them prime targets of cybercriminals. To protect AI-driven operations, implement security testing. Security testing identifies vulnerabilities exploitable by hackers while verifying that LLMs operate in an acceptable framework.


Security concerns associated with LLMs and AI usually center on data privacy and access control. To begin addressing these risks, the first step should be gaining an understanding of how your LLMs handle data, what information they can access or generate and your business's IT infrastructure (where is stored data, who has access to it etc). Furthermore, an internal process for evaluating data sources used by your LLMs must also be established.


Establish a set of guidelines for the use of LLMs and AI, and incorporate them into a security framework. This should include best practices for data segregation as well as separation between production environments and non-production environments to minimize risks. Furthermore, ensure regular security assessments, vulnerability scans, and penetration tests as part of this plan.

Once you've established a framework for your AI and LLMs, the next step should be integrating data sources to build models tailored specifically for your needs. A key factor here should be making sure that models are trained on high-quality data sources to prevent any sensitive information being exposed through outputs generated by your models.


To avoid this risk, start by integrating your data with an established model such as OpenAI's GPT-4 or Meta's LLaMa. These models have been specifically tailored for specific tasks and require significant resources for training purposes. It may be possible to build your own custom model; however, doing so would require considerable development time as well as investment into infrastructure support.


Data Integration

AI and LLMs have opened new avenues of business efficiency, but their rapid ascent also poses new challenges for protecting data security. Integrating, protecting and safeguarding massive amounts of information accessed by these technologies will be essential if businesses wish to maximize value creation.


One major worry surrounding AI-powered applications is their potential to expose sensitive information through their output. For example, customer support chatbots might unintentionally expose personal data during replies or a content generator may spew toxic rhetoric without warning, leading to data breaches, costly regulatory fines, and irreparable damage to brand reputation.


To address this concern, an encryption framework should be put in place that ensures content generated by AI only reaches those intended recipients. Furthermore, LLM needs to be tested regularly for potential security vulnerabilities, specifically how it handles prompts and inputs; otherwise it could become vulnerable to hacking attacks which expose sensitive information through AI models.


Artificial Intelligence models need access to large data sets in order to learn and build successful models. Such data sets often contain sensitive information that must be protected, including proprietary company data, health records or financial details of individuals, competitive data or even potentially offensive language that needs protecting from being made public.


Now, thanks to modern remediation capabilities, it is easier than ever before to identify and prevent sensitive data leakage by assessing both the training and output of AI systems. Qualys TotalAI offers LLM API scanning specifically tailored for these types of systems that targets critical vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, model theft and sensitive data disclosure.


No matter if you choose COTS applications or custom apps, public GPT hosted by a service provider or prefer the exclusive access of private models, establishing clear processes and guidelines is vital to ensure accountability, transparency and security of sensitive data and your company's reputation. Without such guidelines in place, employees may become complacent about using these technologies and risk damage to data integrity as well as to their company reputation.


Data Integrity

Integrity of data means making sure that information in AI and LLM systems is accurate and current, essential for providing accurate customer support as well as driving more informed decision-making processes. Accurate information also ensures regulatory compliance while helping prevent costly mistakes from happening.


An employee entering incorrect dates into a spreadsheet, or misaddressing contacts in emails can lead to inaccurate analytics and false conclusions that can potentially have harmful repercussions for customers and brands alike. Accurate information also negatively impacts customer experiences and trust between brands and their consumers.


As part of your efforts to ensure data accuracy, a key first step should be tracking where and how information originated - whether manually or automatically entered. This allows you to quickly detect and respond to any potential problems such as breaches in sensitive personal information.

Another effective way of verifying the integrity of AI and LLM models is ensuring they operate within a secure environment, including having appropriate security protocols in place, and that your infrastructure has enough computing power and storage capacity for this kind of technology.

Your LLM and AI must also easily integrate with existing platforms and applications using communication protocols and APIs, with tools for monitoring, performance tracking and troubleshooting available to monitor these systems.


Security should always be of top concern in an organization, especially since LLM and AI systems often incorporate sensitive data into vital business processes. Without adequate protection in place, LLM and AI systems could become vulnerable to cyberattacks that compromise critical data breaches that cost millions in lost revenues and expose sensitive business information.


Selecting a private AI model can help to mitigate risks by securely incorporating LLMs into your enterprise operations. There is a range of open-source and commercial solutions that offer AI's benefits at scale while protecting privacy and security; some cloud-based models may even run directly on your infrastructure via API. In either case, these solutions give your organization the flexibility and control it needs to harness AI insights while mitigating risks.


Data Security

Integrating AI into your business workflows requires significant amounts of data that needs to be securely protected and managed, or else hackers could use this sensitive information against you and exploit it to steal confidential data, spoof or manipulate AI models, or cause harmful results such as prompt injection attacks, leakage or inappropriate content production.


As such, ensuring the security of data fed into LLM models is vital for AI and business success. While LLMs offer many advantages in terms of accuracy and safety, maintaining this goal remains an ongoing challenge that necessitates an all-encompassing and holistic strategy to guarantee their safe deployment within your company.


There are tools available that can assist with this important task. One category of such tools, known as AI firewalls, provides comprehensive monitoring and management to ensure all interactions between AI models and applications remain safe and secure. In addition, these firewalls seek to identify any potential issues within their model that might pose privacy or security threats.


These tools take a network-centric approach to AI-driven workflow security by monitoring all traffic entering and leaving LLM or API-powered tools, providing security teams with an early warning of suspicious activities or requests that require further review before being granted full review.


As many new AI workflows that have emerged over the past years are driven by generative models, unintended outcomes can arise. From disclosing sensitive information to producing inappropriate or even biased content, such results could have serious repercussions such as direct financial loss, regulatory fines, brand damage and customer trust erosion. To address this problem, CISOs must implement robust policies that protect generative AI against emerging threats and vulnerabilities - the ideal approach being private LLMs that give control over safeguards protecting data while ensuring AI performs according to plan.

 

With the right partner, digital transformation doesn't have to be complicated. Asylum Technologies is here to help.

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