Cybersecurity Challenges in the Age of AI: New Attack and Defense Opportunities

 Recent decades have seen the unprecedented success of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its impact resonating beyond the confines of the technology sector to influence fields as diverse as finance, healthcare, social media, and education. Despite achiev?ing remarkable service advancements, the security implications of AI technologies have not been adequately explored. This oversight raises critical concerns, particu?larly as our reliance on digital infrastructure grows. In this context, cybersecurity emerges as a pivotal element, ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of information against an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. My thesis aims to address the dual facets of the secure AI challenge: firstly, assessing the vulnerability of current AI systems to cyber threats, and secondly, exploring the potential of AI technologies as proactive defense mechanisms to bolster system security. Specifically, this thesis will delve into federated learning—a security?conscious learning paradigm—and generative AI, the state-of-the-art application, emphasizing their roles in advancing novel attack and defense strategies within the cybersecurity domains.