Arm’s Rise, AWS Vibecoding, and Deepfake Threats to Trust in Government | TSG Ep. 881

Hey, everyone, you ready to get your vibe on? You're watching Tech Trunk Inc. Hi everyone.

Happy Wednesday. It's Alan Shimmel for Techstrong Gang. Welcome to joining us right here on Hump Day.

Kinda hard to believe Wednesday, I believe there was Monday. Um, we've got great show too. We get some interesting things going on.

Not all ai, but some ai. Uh, we've, and we've got some really interesting people to talk about 'em with. They're all regulars here on the gang.

Let me quickly introduce you to them. We have, uh, Mitch Ashley, Chris Blak, Kate Scarcella, Dan o Dan O'Brien, and of course, the dean, Mike Ard coming at you from Lake Placid. I don't know if he's going off the ski jump like Eddie the Eagle or what, but whatever.

Welcome, welcome gang members. Thanks for being here. You know, we're gonna start off today.

We're gonna come back to the vibe, but we're gonna start off with Arm. Mike. You know, to me ARM is one of the great success, untold great success stories in tech over the last 10 years.

Why don't you start us off there? Yeah. The, their CEO came out and just kind of made a comment to the fact that they now have 70,000 customers for our arm chips.

And we all talk about GPUs all day long. But most of the workloads I know are running on traditional CPU still. And, um, we talk about Intel and, uh, a MD, but looks to me, you know, I I think it was last year when AWS told me, I think half of their new workloads are running on their ARM-based chips.

So Dan is Arm kind of like rapidly emerging, is, I don't know, the number two, three player in CHIPS or where, why don't we talk more about arm? Yeah, listen, I, I, I think the ARM story's been incredible. You know, if I had to pinpoint why we don't talk about arm, uh, it's, 'cause generally I think we're talking about their customers.

I mean, they are really the key enabler of a lot of silicon innovation in the industry over the past decade or so. Um, you know, it comes from really more of an embedded background, really, the primary player in mobile enabled by their customers like Apple, Qualcomm, media Tech, uh, Samsung, Huawei, uh, but more recently, you know, really making a, a significant move in the data center space. And that's really where the action is.

As we know, um, AI silicon, uh, is all the rage. And, you know, pretty much every competitor that we talk about to Nvidia is really being enabled by arm. I mean, you know, Intel and a MD would be kind of the exceptions there.

And, uh, I think we all know kind of Intel's woes a MD getting more competitive. I think their rack scale solution coming next year will, you know, continue to give them some momentum on the GPU side. But really all of these ai, asics, uh, are are really driven by arm.

We think about, you know, Google's TPU, um, arm ip, you know, with some Broadcom, uh, design help behind it. Um, everything Marvell is doing, uh, really everything the hyperscalers are doing through vertical integration enabled by Arm. You see, you know, graviton and, you know, Inia and Traum at the AWS, um, you see the Maya Silicon that Microsoft's working on.

You know, really ARM is the enabler of that alternative to Nvidia ecosystem. And, you know, a lot of it coming from really their history as somebody who's been able to really drive a lot of performance at a lot lower power, you know, envelope, obviously power consumption is coming a really key bottleneck in ai. Um, but you know, they've also invested a lot on the software side.

I think we continue to see that, you know, software is the great enabler of hardware. You know, in order for a new chip architecture to Latch, you really need to invest heavily on the software side. And I think Arm's done that.

So, uh, definitely a hot name. Somebody we should probably be talking more about. Um, and again, you know, to the degree we talk about them less, it's because they really give a lot of the shine to their customers.

It, it, it's almost not as much customers as truly channel partners, right? Because I think that's the key to, um, their distribution. How many times have we sat on here and said, who's going to compete with Nvidia?

My God, this is a runaway train. No one can compete with Nvidia. And I'm not saying anyone can at a $4 trillion valuation, but when you look at arm's distribution, and that's Dan, to your point, you just nailed it.

It's, it's, we don't hear about arm. It's because most of their channel partners, their go to market partners are companies we're hearing about now adding them all up. I still don't know if they come close to NVIDIA's, you know, uh, market share or penetration there.

But remember, NVIDIA is pretty much, I mean, it was a gaming chip now, of course, but the, you know, the real bread and butter here is the AI chip. I think ARM has a, a much broader footprint of technology, you know, in terms of chips. It's not, you mentioned it's the mobile chip, it's now the data center chip.

It's the laptop chip, right? It, I mean, it's an enviable powerhouse Yeah. Significant inroads with PCs, right?

Enabled by Apple and Qualcomm where they get some share. Sure. Um, and starting to get into the market themself.

I mean, I, I think we see, you know, ARM launching its own chip sometime later this year. You know, it's been widely reported. Meta is a kind of key customer for them on that side.

Um, but really much more playing on the CPU side, you know, than the GPU side at this point in time in the data center. But, you know, companies come out and said, targeting 50% share of data center by the end of this year. So, you know, clearly making some significant inroads.

And I think a lot of that's been enabled by the, you know, internal silicon efforts of the hyperscalers, uh, the past several years. I think notably Google and, and, and AWS, um, quite far ahead on that front in terms of using arm Yeah, arm's kind of one of those 20 year overnight successes, right? They've been at this for a long time.

Um, but to your point, Dan, it, it's, we talk about 'em when we talk about, um, Qualcomm and Apple M chips and all of the different, the, the licensing that they've done with their architecture, which has been frankly a brilliant strategy. It's the alternative to Intel where here's the architecture. You can build your own chips using that, you know, licensing that technology.

And you mentioned this too, and I want to emphasize it. 'cause I noticed about three, four years ago when you were talking to ARM people, they were emphasizing how do we get compatibility for ARM into open source projects? How do we get compatibility for ARM into data centers?

How do we get compatibility? So they've made a real effort to kind of, you know, go at the, go at the, the low end of, let's get into the infrastructure, let's get into this software stack to make sure we're already there so people can compile and run on ARM just as well as they can, you know, in Intel or in some cases in Nvidia. So Mitch, you know, we've talked about the concept of application modernization on this show, and it's always usually in the context of mainframes to something that's X 86.

And as I scratch my head and I think about all this, I'm like, am I gonna see app modernization where we're gonna take legacy workloads and move them from X 86 to arm because there are benefits to be had and how hard or how big a lift might that be? Absolutely. And that goes to the whole, you know, underlying software substrate.

If you are open source stack that you're using all the different element of projects, for example, or support, support arm already, you can recompile your applications. Maybe you do some design to optimize for mobile kind of apps if that's what you're doing. Um, but it's a much smaller lift to do that today, by the way.

You know, we, we talk about modernization of mainframe applications. Well, how old is Netflix's infrastructure, right? That's been built over many, many years.

There's a lot of legacy stuff they have. We think of Netflix and AWS and, uh, and Lyft and, uh, different companies that we work with today, as, you know, new and innovative. But they've got software stacks that have been present and built up over many years.

So everybody has got this modernization challenge to some degree where they need to keep up their software infrastructure and their stack moving forward. Well, and, and you know, this is all happening in a macro environment where, to be clear, none of us have any idea where the hell AI is going, right? And suddenly in the last couple years, we've all gone, oh, graphic processors are really good at vector math, which is what we need to run the, you know, the LOM holographic spaces and so forth, and it goes through the roof at the same time, the use of those chip sets in that technology and that whole stack is using more power than, you know, God's own little bunny is to make popcorn.

Right? And it's becoming more evident that, that there's other ways to do it. You know, there are tasks that inference engines are fantastic for, but asking them to add 42 plus three is not really one of them.

And so this, at the chip level, everyone is focusing on GPUs, but at the architecture level, and I have no idea whether this is part of it, but this is the way I think about it. We've all forgotten other chips exist, other processors do things way better things quite often, as long as you're not trying to, you know, you know, fold a molecule And, and with a lower energy consumption, which is, as we go forward, as a person who has dealt extensively with energy, I can tell you that, um, from a ICE have seen them, um, the arm architecture through IOT devices and I IOT devices, and that footprint is massive. So I think on, for the Wing, Well, the trend in the market towards heterogeneous compute, right?

Really design, uh, silicon for, you know, for the specific workloads, um, that's been kind of the mega trend over the last several years. That more workloads that are finding the way that Silicon, that's kind of purpose built. Um, and Arm's really been the great enabler of that, right?

So I think, you know, that that trend continues and, you know, to Chris's point on a lot of the stuff we're playing with in ai, we may have a fundamentally wrong architecture for it's gonna land in the long term. And, you know, arms seems really well positioned to benefit from some of that rationalization and that balancing of, you know, kind of price performance that needs to happen across the market. They've got the licensing model down for sure, Dan.

Well, Dan and Dan, Dan, I love where the, where that goes as well. 'cause uh, that takes us sort of a step further than I was thinking, but yeah, I'll say it. You know, we think that 90 to 99% power reduction to see the, uh, achieve the same task can be done, right?

You know, it's just as you look case by case, it's sort of ridiculous. Um, but the, you know, as you take a step further, because of the adaptability that we have these days with, with these sort of tools and structures, um, yeah. Not just GPUs or X 86 or, you know, why not, you know, remember E OMS and programmable chip and so forth, it was really big back in the day and customized hardware for workloads.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. So if they're down on that track, I'm with them. Let me, let me come back to the best kept secret in tech kind of theme on Arm here.

If we weren't in this Nvidia irrational exuberance, if you, if I may call it that at some level, what a story arm would be because they would be competing with just a MD and Intel and, and quite frankly, they're kicking butt there. Well, AMD's a channel partner, right, at some level, but they'd be kicking butt. I mean, when you look at what Apple has done with their chips, with the Apple silicon compared to the Intel, you know, based on this architecture, it really is.

I mean, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal story and they've been able to do it. Now, Dan, I know you used to cover Arm back in the day. I'm not gonna say you, I'm not gonna say you're old.

Yeah. They were a public company before software bought them. Uh, uh, covered them as an equity.

Yeah, they, they're riding the Nvidia train too, right? They're, they, you know, they're on the CPU side and their CPUs are right alongside NVIDIA's, GPUs. I mean, let's not forget Nvidia did try to buy Arm, uh, which maybe was the validation we all should have picked up on at the time, um, as to their potential.

Obviously that didn't get through, uh, you know, antitrust, but, uh, you know, NVIDIA's cra, CPU are all based on arm, arm, uh, architecture as well. So, um, certainly they would be picking up more if Nvidia weren't doing what they were doing, but, you know, they're, they're benefiting from that trend as well. Yeah.

Their Tegra chip is based on Arm several things. Yeah. Anybody be, anybody besides me kinda have a perception that maybe these arm chips are just fundamentally more secure, the next 86 chips.

Is that a benefit of this as well? I don't know. I, I always think of, I met, uh, a person who is 5, 6, 6, 7 years ago, and he just left Intel as their, you know, a, uh, not firmware, but the, the actual chip security person.

He just got the point. He had to say, you, we can't tell anymore, right? So maybe, you know, security, the chip level can be, you know, optimized.

But again, we're, we're levels of complexity. And I'm thinking out loud here, recursing these same tools back on that maybe we can raise, uh, chip level security, but frankly, I never count on that sort of thing. That's beyond the can.

You need to secure everything at a layer you can see. And the other thing, you know, Mike, that sounds very much like the old, old Apple's much more secure than Windows kind of argument, right? Look, when you have a certain amount of of market share, you get that bullseye, right?

And I, and, and this might be an interesting thing to see how it plays out. Arm keeps making a lot of noise about how much market share they're getting. They become more of a target for the security people.

I, I, I don't believe that any of these architectures are necessarily inherently more secure than others, right? I I Think that's fair. A but I also think, you know, we can probably chart arms rise, you know, alongside kind of Intel's, you know, fallback to the pack where, I mean, I think, you know, the reality is is we're probably in year 10 to 15 of a three to four decade transition away from X 86 as the dominant architecture.

Um, um, obviously ARM obviously was there on the embedded side, but really kind of took the momentum from Intel and Mobile. Um, we've chipped away at Intel a little bit on the PC side with what Apple and, you know, Qualcomm and the I PC have done, and, you know, X 86 is the dominant architecture and data center for, you know, kind of all of history up until probably the last five to 10 years, uh, with re you know, really the momentum coming in the last five, um, and seemingly going forward. So, um, you know, that, that, that's probably the bigger trend here is, you know, we've kind of moved from an Intel world to an armed world.

I, I mean, when they write the history books on this, I mean, in Intel's miss on mobile in general, it is probably, I, I'm not gonna say it's fatal, but it was fateful in terms of allowing a lot of, uh, a lot of people to come in and, and, and compete there. Um, but look, hey, I got, I got, I got 10 bucks that says that there's gonna be an AI agent for converting X 86 workloads to arm before the end of the year. So it might not be two decades, Dan, If there isn't already, if there Isn't already.

Pretty Compelling stories there on AWS with customers making that exact transition in, Hey, speaking of AWS, they're kind of groovy getting their vibe on. We're gonna talk about that next. You're watching techron Gang Discover Techron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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Hey folks, we're back. And as Alan said, AWS is previewing an IDE called kiro. And it does a couple of things, but at its core it's talking about vibe coding for the enterprise.

And the two pieces of it are hooks that are essentially links to backend services that are probably AI agents that will automate a series of tasks for you. You can program those yourselves. And then there's a thing called specs, which are the actual steps for building the application and more of the vibe coating, but it's kind of like guardrails built in so that you can't go wrong and all you have to do is kind of like, describe what you wanna have happen and the ID will magically make this happen.

Mitch, we've talked about vibe coating before and we've kind of been a little bit dismissive of as an enterprise tool, but I don't know, is something happening here? Well, the big thing that's happening first Kiro is ides CLI are cool now, right? Everybody's coming out one, or they're acquiring one or doing something around that, because that's the environment that software is created in.

That's where developers spend most of their time. It's kind of the kitchen of software development. And what, what's interesting is a KIRO announced by AWS is actually based on the open source of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code vs code, which has got 73 to 75% market share among developers.

It is widely used, you know, even app people that like Apple still develop on vs code. So they've taken that open source and what they've done is not just added another I can generate code with whatever LLM model that you like to use. They've stepped back and said, well, yeah, we can do that, but let's really talk about what the developer's work is.

So they've, they've emphasized what they call secure specs, was the upfront developing stories, turning those into requirements, turning that into design, what that whole flow before you really start writing code and laying out those plans and then, uh, proving that with the, with the developer and then going to the coding phase and moving beyond. And of course, what you talked about hooking into AI along the way to build and also to to operate your code. So I think it's more of a holistic approach to IDs than just a nice editor sitting, uh, alongside of a, a great natural interface to kind of guide your, your whatever you're asking the agent or the AI to do, LLMs to do on the backend.

And I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. There was an announcement actually just the other day by Perforce who came out with Perfecto ai, which is a testing tool that instead of just generating tests, it actually monitors the requirements, the, uh, PDFs or the, the, uh, PRDs that you put together for a product. Whatever you use to guide, guide your requirements or stories from Agile and actually generates tests from that.

And analyzing code is code changes. So it's dynamically creating tests, not just here create a bunch of tests for my code today. It's looking more holistically at the development process.

That's the key trend to really get the productivity out of AI for software development. Very Good. Mitch.

You know, I gotta tell you, people say shimmy, you have fun doing what you do. This, this whole vibe thing is exactly the kind of stuff why I enjoy doing what we do here, right? Lemme just get a quick history of vibe coding on Textron Gang.

I don't think it was more than three, four months ago. It was the first time vibe, maybe six months ago. We mentioned Vibe coding and Chris, I don't know if it was you or one of the other security experts said, nonsense, this stuff will never work.

It's, it's buggy, it's terrible. It's it's crappy code. It's low quality, it's a toy about a month later, you know, vibe, coating's, a nice little kind of hobby to do for a little home project.

You know, it's not terrible. A month later after that, you know, a lot of people are vibe coating. There's some interesting stuff.

It'll never work in the enterprise mind you, but you know, for little stuff it's not so bad. Here we are, mark, the date July 15th, AWS comes out with an IDE for vibe coding for the enterprise. Is this, is this the world we live in?

Is it, are we in of like a, a time zone? Chris, what do you, what do you say? Well, I, that doesn't sound like something I would say, but if I did all on that one and, and it's wrong, you know, I'm listening to Mitch, you know, uh, I go through all that and that sounds exactly right to me.

And you know how the concerns I have for how, you know, AI is, is applied these days, that sounds like a logical structure. Now, I'd, I'd love to spend more time and pick it apart and see exactly how they're doing something LLM stuff, but it's, it's is, yeah. So that, you know, what I'm finding as, as folks who were spending a lot of time around me the last couple months, uh, are finding out that, I'll use the word semantic an awful lot because AI doesn't describe at all what we're talking about here.

I mean, any more than 700 other things, but they're semantic systems, and these are exactly the kind of, uh, use cases where you can understand that there's, there's someone over here who has some characteristics and they're relating to something over here and building code. Mitch, as you're walking through that, I'm thinking through the steps and how that would be used. And, and again, I would bet that if I stared at it really hard, I would have a lot of criticisms, but it's in the right place, right?

You know, I haven't done a lot of coding in, you know, I have used every language ever, but I try to avoid it in the last three months because I have these semantic partners. I write or copy and paste and occasionally edit piles and piles and piles of code. So everything I hear about vibe matches my thoughts.

Now, it's not about the exact that I put the commas in the right place is do I know why I'm doing what I'm doing? And that's the semantic screen kind of thing that, that what we, you know, erroneously call AI is literally fantastically built for it. Yeah.

The term was actually coined in February, Alan, and it was an expost by, um, Andre Cari, who was a co-founder of Open ai. I think he was Tesla before that. Um, and it was his, it is a kind of a nice little definition, essentially.

It's, it's, you know, when you're vibing, you're like in the zone, right? And this is about being in the zone of creating software using ai. So you're leaning into ai, not writing code traditionally, and kind of augmenting with, with, you know, some things that AI can do for you.

It's like, let's maximize what you can do with AI and see what's possible. And that's what caught on about it is it started to describe what developers and platform engineers and testers are starting to experience as they really lean into AI for their work, is there's prompting and then there's really vibing where you're really using AI in some of the capacities that, so I I, in ways we having two, I see two use patterns around this vibe coding that I, it, you know, just from my observations and my friends, there's the, the crisp Blas of the world who I wouldn't necessarily consider a coder, a professional coder who are vibing, right? They're vibing and, and then there's real, there's real software developers, right?

Real professional coders. They're also vibing, but I think they're vibing to be fair, and Chris, no disrespect to you, but they're vibing at another level, Right? Right.

As they should. Well, it's an accelerant no matter where you are on the curve. Yeah.

Right? Whether you're, you know, kind of more of a beginner who knows enough to be dangerous or a true expert, it's shifting you up the curve in terms of what you're able to produce, right? I mean, that to me is the big observation here is like writing code and software development, software engineering.

It might be the ultimate AI use case. Well, that, that's what you would think from all the, the, the, the press and, you know, airtime it gets, it, it certainly is, you know, and, and Well, but I think a, the people are also like, that's, that's flowing through, right? I mean, you've heard about like a 50% decrease in the number of DevOps people in AWS as they're rolling this stuff out, right?

You've seen, uh, you know, some of the layoffs across the deck industry. Uh, I do think that we are getting that productivity because of this. And I think, you know, it's real enough that it's actually being reflective.

Google paid, what was it? Was it three and a half billion or two and a half? No, excuse me.

4 to license the windsurf. We just spoke about this yesterday. 4 billion to license the windsurf, uh, uh, software.

And they hired the CEO, like the, the brains of the operation, supposedly. And they were in pretty good shape before that. Yeah.

Right? I mean, that was Gem Gemini. They, they clearly wanted to make Gemini a better AI coder.

But let me give you the other Absolutely. That dropped on this some other AI company. They haven't released the amount they paid for it, but they bought Windsurf yesterday, right?

I, and I, I, forgive me, I don't remember the name of this other AI company. Everybody's Got a piece of windsurf. Like if you didn't buy Windsurf for the last week, You've missed out.

Exactly. So, but we spoke, There's cognition. Alan Is cognition that bought it.

Yes. Right. You know, so we spoke about yesterday, well, what, boy, they left Windsurf for dead.

They're picking the bones. Someone, someone found those bones pretty tasty. And Windsurf is pretty smart, smart people.

I have a couple of questions for Mitch. So, does vibe coding mean like no-code, low-code tools or history? I mean, are we like moving on behind?

Uh, 'cause you know, it seems like this is the same use case that we used to use for low-code, no-code. Yeah, I think, I think AI is the new low-code, no-code. And it's interesting talking to people that have low-code, no-code tools today is they're in this bifurcated world of bringing in AI to start to do more of the work with citizens developers, but they also don't want to immediately, uh, cannibalize their current customer base, have got things they've already built in the current tools.

So I think that transition is happening, but I, I want to go back to what Dan said. I, I took the position about three months ago in one of our papers that the place to watch of what AI is doing is in the developer world. And because not just 'cause I like development and like developers and all that stuff, is, that's the tip of the spear.

That's where, that's the landing dock on the shores to, uh, you know, come into the country and go through immigration and be part of the development process. Developers love to innovate. They love to try new things.

Not every one of them, but it's a very innovative crowd, very indi independent crowd. And they will find use for it, and they'll find use cases you don't even anticipate. And if you follow what's happening in development and how that's changing, not only coding, but the overall work of the coders.

I mean, I talked to very expense experienced developers that tell me I'm more tired than ever when I go home today because I'm thinking about this stuff at a much different level. It's just not like, I need to convert this from JavaScript to this. It's, I'm working up here and they're getting so much more done.

So it, it is informing, I think, the rest of the market, at least in the software world of what testing can look like, or what platform engineering can look like, what ops can look like. And I think the vendors who are smart will look at their own development teams as well as other development organizations as leading indicators of what AI is changing in how we create software. I think you're so smart to call the tip of the spear, Mitch.

I mean, it's the people building AI that are applying it to their own work, you know, their own kind of workload. Um, it, it, it really is kind of where all the experimentation and the leading edge is happening. Um, that kind of the ultimate client zero story.

And now that's why I think it's so interesting to watch the companies that are building ai, because I think they're gonna resemble what all companies look like longer term. I think, you know, the things you see happening and the changes, you know, in terms of workforce composition that you see in the companies that are really leading on the curve of building ai. Uh, that's kind of where everybody else is gonna end up eventually, in my opinion.

All right, here's my, here's here's my prediction, right? So we started out from concept in February, and we're now at Enterprise in July. All this stuff is a commodity by September.

Nothing to see here. And and I think along with that, Mike, it totally equalizes people who are non coders to the people who are big DevOps quotes. Well, that, that's that whole citizen developer thing.

Chris, go ahead. I'm sorry buddy. I No, that's okay.

I person, so I'll give you an example of, of vibe coating, right? You know, in the last couple months, you know, I have written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of, uh, shell scripts and Python scripts and so forth, because I said I want to build a metabolic system. That's it.

And step by step, you know, my, my AI partner who knows other stuff, works, presents options, you know, raise the code. I put it in it, run it, it works. Doesn't work every single step that I know how to do myself faster.

And I don't have the attention span. You know, I've hacked everyone's code. I've written some myself, but as you say, I'm not a coder, right?

That's a long, tedious job. Now I can surf in, because to your point, Kate, I know what I want. I know how it's done.

I don't wanna do the work. I don't have to. I just, I guess to the term of this segment, I just know the vibe.

I know what I want. And now I have a, a complex, you know, we quiet wire have a complex, uh, system, you know, mesh that is based on, you know, existing technologies that is, uh, supporting semantic processes in a, in a, in a auto autonomous, you know, human machine, a to a, you know, fashion in two months. I love it.

Yeah. I wanna close this segment out with this, though no doubt that the, the, the lens has been focused or the, in, in terms of the AI mar ai market on how AI is taking over coding or has the potential to, to really ruled coding and software engineering. But as humans, as humans, and we're all humans, I think here list someone's a deep fake, um, what it's doing in software coding, it will do in other verticals, whether it's medicine or lore or manufacturing or what have you.

That's why we spend so much time talking about ai. It's not just that we're geeks and this is the world we live in. This is, this is happening, this is going to, this is going to, you know, send ripples and waves and tsunamis across every piece of it.

And, and it, we can't, you can't lose sight of that when we talk, you know, I, I've already spoken to some on my wife's family, to tell you the truth. They're not tech people. And they're like, ah, yeah, this ai it's a tech thing.

You know, they, they don't see it coming, you know, as Bobby Bakala said to, uh, Tony Soprano, do you think you even hear it when it comes? You should be hearing it right now. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. Visit www security boulevard com to learn more.

com. Home of security bloggers network. Hey, folks, we're back, and we're gonna shift gears a little bit.

We're talking about some ai, but we're talking about cybersecurity and impersonation of government officials using deep fakes. And the latest victim, apparently is Marco Rubio. But this has been going on for a little while now.

So, Chris, are we on the cusp of, I don't know, outright anarchy? I mean, who's in charge? And nobody knows.

I am shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here. Um, yeah, with this in 1990 at General Electric in South Carolina, we, you know, I was there. We put a video conference centers, we had a demo tape, it was the world leading graphics, uh, animation, and it had like real fluid, fluid mo uh, T-Rex running around with silver skin.

But, you know, moving realistically was amazing. And sitting there in 1990, and I, you know, talking to my, my colleague saying, at some point, we're gonna make it so you cannot tell the difference. Can't be admissible in court.

What do we do? Right? So it's not like this hasn't been a long time coming and we're here now, like we were talking about in the break about ai.

Yeah, if, if never, okay, you know, but if eventually this isn't, eventually, eventually we will have these capabilities to take out. Now what does that even mean? Well, it means we're gonna have these sort of conversations where we say, did anybody think about how do we know who's who on the internet?

But, uh, we skipped that part. Um, you don't, and, and, you know, again, my favorite topic, you know, we're making all these things with ais that have no common ethical framework, and we'll do anything anybody feels like, you know, probing them into, so yeah, this is where we are. And I personally, along this, um, sorry.

No, no, go ahead, Kate. Uh, I think disinformation is, is tearing our nation apart. It is horrible what we see happening, and we don't have any real security mitigating controls at present.

And Really, and, and you know, since I, since I just acknowledged the problem, let me, you know, take a stab at, at the solution. I think there is solutions and, and, you know, we saw this coming from miles, miles away. There are all sorts of structures out there, including attest station systems and whatnot that have, that are exercise to reasonable depths.

And, and again, all my biases, uh, being acknowledged, you know, civic ai, ai that actually has a common shared referable reference boundary that attest to things, it does, you know, that, you know, like a human, you know, and again, on the AI side, it's just like, just like this, will we never, ever, ever give to the point where they are, quote unquote, you know, the same as us or smart as us? And if so, you know, what do we need to do with it? If not, then forget it.

If so, then we had to in advance think about how do we manage that? And I think the answer is ethics, right? You knowis right now will do whatever, whatever.

There's no tracing, there's no tracking. You know, civic ais, you know, that are following the, the canon that, that we published, you know, we, and now others are, are working on out there. Um, they will not do things because it's unethical.

And they will write it down. If you ask them, Man, I would give 10 K to be able to do a mission impossible. Tear off my mask right now, and I'm someone else under here.

'cause here, here's the issue with this. Hey, let's not make AI the whipping boy for deep fakes, right? Deep fakes has been, have been going on since before AI and AI makes it easier.

AI makes these deep fakes better, but deep fakes, you know, have been going on. I I, I have a confession. When I first started getting involved in computers, the first thing I was playing with were graphics programs.

And yeah, I would love switching people's heads onto other bodies and then doing stupid things. I was young and stupid. Now I'm just old, still not so smart sometimes, but, you know, deep fakes is a long time, as you say, criticism, this is not new stuff.

It's just easier to do. Now, Kate, to your point, it's not just deep fakes. That's, that's tearing the fat.

It's, it's the whole misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, everybody goes into their own echo chambers and all that stuff. Again, let's not blame AI for that, right? Let AI has enough problems, right?

I bring, go ahead. Just to be clear, Alan was switching heads on action figures like 50 years ago, Computers, Joe, GI Joe, one guy had the beard, one guy did it. But anyway, But you know, the, this, the, the Rubio thing, isn't that remarkable to me, I think what's a more important one is it's been less than two months ago.

I think it was in June when the company was Arup, I believe Hong Kong based firm, where somebody got a phishing email. And that led to a conference call with the deep fake of That was was, I believe, wasn't it, It, was it Singapore? Yeah.

Okay. I I think it was Hong Kong, whichever. But they transferred $25 million I think it was, and only to figure out, oops, that was not a, that was not our CFO.

So that's one example. You think that's the only example That's where the real kind of, yes, it's Steve fake and false information in society, and that's, that's its own set of problems, but the money behind this and how much money will be stolen or already is being stolen because you could do this is scary. So how will I know whether or not Dan O'Brien on this call is a deep fake?

Do I have to have two machine services validate who he is, plus somebody who actually knows him to verify to me that that's actually Dan, or, um, I know it's not gonna apply. I gotta take a page from Kate. I think where you're going with this, you know, and, and I think I've said this on the show, my favorite little artifacts right now is seven years ago, I told a nation of 25 million years that in seven of, uh, people that in seven years, they would have to have an answer to this question or their lights will turn because I, people like me will tell 'em to turn off.

Hey, why not? So this is it. It is, and it isn't.

This has been a long time coming, but it's woven in with everything else. How do we verify that the person telling you to turn off the power to a major city is the person telling you and they're authorized answer is not well, and folks like me and people with, you know, interesting motivations can get around those, you know, should they choose to. Now again, this is an inevitably question, will it always, I tell you, amongst security people, I, I love, uh, arguing with my friends about this one.

It'll never be better. It'll always be really like, it'll never, things never change. It's always gonna be exactly this bad.

Now I think I can get a lot better. I think it's always been sloppy. We've gotten away with it forever.

We're being forced in the ways to fix it, and we have the ways to fix it. So it's everything from a video to a social media post or whatnot. We'll get the visibility into provenance and so forth to the point that we can function.

We Have to, well, we have, we have, we have fixed similar issues with security. When you look at the whole, you know, uh, digital, uh, uh, certificates like the Digi Cert business, right? And, and that kind of thing.

And we even have post quantum algorithms for these certificates we've been, we've been able to solve, is that information real with digital certificate technology? Now, that doesn't mean that someone doesn't get a phishing mail saying, Hey, I got your updated, uh, wire information, and you say, oh my goodness, that's the wrong wire information. Let me correct it for you.

Right? That, that's human error. And it's the same thing here with deep fakes.

We could have certificates and, and digital watermarks and all of these things for our own right protection, but it's still the person behind the keyboard, especially, you know, when we talk about electronic stuff, it's the human error that we need to correct. Don't blame the technology Defenders, you know, tend to feel, you know, uh, uh, you're looking from the wrong side. You gotta think about this from the attacker perspective.

It's hard to imagine it being easier to successfully pull these sort of narrative attacks. Now, it's unlikely that it will stay exactly as easy. In fact, I think small changes make the world of the, the narrative attackers much harder.

I think That people process technology. Amen. Absolutely.

I, I think at the end of the day that, um, it can get better, but we are, as the article points out, woefully unprepared for this along. So, yeah, I mean, we, we really are getting to the point where we all almost need a zero trust mindset when it comes to consuming any information, right? Like, it all needs to be authenticated.

It all needs to be verified. I mean, I think a lot of the problem we talk about, you know, when it comes to more of the disinformation things, where Kate was talking about earlier is, you know, the media landscape has moved from one that's been fairly highly centralized to massively distributed, right? And, you know, we, we've gotta, you know, get back, you know, particularly when it comes to, you know, government officials and the messages that they're communicating out to the public, uh, we've gotta have those trusted channels that they're flowing through, right?

Like, you know, seeing it on an ex post or, you know, seeing it on a, a, a web, you know, a a a web video. That's probably not enough. We, you know, we need to be able to have places we can go where, you know, we know what we consume through that channel is gonna be real and gonna be verified.

Um, but yeah, No, no, well enough, right? Because the, the, you know, it is easy to get this, you know, feel despair when you look at increasing volumes of, you know, how am I going to process all of, and if the answer is you, you'll never be able to then this either. We'll never be able to fix it or there's something else.

And I think we look back, not as far back as you think, um, at how human culture has maintained, you know, enough shared narrative to get through the day. It's small bits of a tested information that everybody can agree on. You know, that's a rock.

And we all agree that rock's been there for the last two weeks, and that's the sort of capability that we have to today and, and is beginning to happen today, brought enough narrative reference points that most of the time, we'll, we'll have the same results as we do in life, which isn't perfect, but, you know, it's, it's an not, So, Chris, I think you just said we're all gonna agree that something's an actual fact when in reality we can't even do that. Yes, we can. Yeah.

I mean, you be surprised. You really would be surprised. You know, the sky is blue on sunny days, right?

You know, there's, there's enough things we agree on. It doesn't have to be much, it's not about out shouting, you know, think about it, you know, large numbers of people going down the street, you put one little thing on the street, the entire flow of people changing around it. It's not about convincing everybody anything that Dad.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, uh, you know, I think we deal with deep fakes to deal with the way we deal with fakes of everything else, right? I mean, you know, look at the a hundred dollars bill. Now, how do we make sure that the hundred that we, you know, have in our wallet is real, right?

You can mark it with the little pen. You've got the hologram, you've got all these things, right? Uh, you know, I, I think we're just gonna need to approach digital assets the same way we, we approach fakes with physical assets, whether it be a hundred dollars bill, a concert ticket, um, you know, a high-end luxury item, like a, a high-end watch or, you know, piece of, uh, piece of, uh, you know, clothing or furniture.

Um, you know, we're, we're gonna need to find ways to validate that things are what they say they are. Glad you said that, because I, it comes down to something physical, right? Something you have, you recognize this Chris, right?

Something, you know, something you have when it comes to a person, anything can be faked, right? I can fake your social security once I have your social security number could go do bad things with it. I can fake you, uh, with your voice or with your image.

But today we re we rely on, I think increasingly it's gotta be something physically that we have. If I'm sitting on a conference call and I have a device that I'm holding that is my VI device and verify that it's mine and electronically and can verify that that device is present during my conversation with you, or it's watermarked in my digital image or whatever it might be, the physical part of this, to your point, Dan, the dollar bill, whether it's the strips we're inserting into it or the holographs, there is a physical component to security to be able to validate human identity and who We are. So are we gonna have to do two factor every time I do a zoom with you, Mitch?

No. Yeah, I'll disagree with you, Mitch, on this one, because it, the difference is not something you have is something you are andt mean biometrics. And you know, it's like, and we're pushing time here, but yeah, that's the something you are, is you can't be taken away from you and, and you, you know where you are, Simon.

You're environment, right? Yeah. So let you're, Let me wrap this up for us.

You know, my con law teacher in law school a hundred years ago taught us something and I, it's proven true. Society runs three to five years behind technology, right? And this ai deep fake stuff.

And by the way, I'll point that on the ticker Taylor, it's Secretary Rubio, not senator. He's the secretary of State three. It's gonna take us three to five years to catch up with what the bad guys are able to do right now with ai, and not just bad guys, with, with whatever's going on with AI Society.

Society has a lot of inertia built in. It doesn't, it doesn't slalom, you know, a ski course. It, it takes big obtuse turns and, and so we could rail on here all we want, but it's gonna take three.

But in five years, we will come up with, whether it's biometrics or something, or it's, Chris is your point, you know, we'll come up with something, we'll mitigate it. It's just gonna take time. This stuff is happening so quick, right?

Maybe someone will come up with a vibe to, to, to fix the deep fakes. I don't know. Anyway, gang, what a great discussion today.

We live in interesting times, that's for sure. Thank you for watching. We hope you've enjoyed today's text on gang.

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Thank you.