What is AI-SPM (AI Security Posture Management)?

AI security posture management is an approach that enables organizations to secure the AI systems and data they rely on. With organizations deploying AI solutions throughout their businesses, new security challenges can emerge that traditional security tools simply are not equipped to combat. AI-SPM offers a dedicated framework and techniques focused on protecting these systems across their life cycle.

The accelerated expansion of AI tech has introduced equally new attack vectors and security insufficiencies for malicious actors. These consist of model poisoning, data manipulation, and inference attacks specifically directed at AI systems. AI-SPM emphasizes understanding, measuring, and managing these distinctive risks so that while an organization is deploying AI applications, their security and trust are not compromised.

This blog will discuss AI security posture management, its importance, and its key components and functionality. We will also discuss the challenges that security teams may face with it, along with its benefits and how SentinelOne can help you with it.

What is AI Security Posture Management (AISPM)?

AI security posture management (AISPM) is the process of continuously monitoring, managing, and improving the security of artificial intelligence systems. This includes vulnerability identification, risk management, and security controls for the AI models, data pipelines, and deployment environments. AISPM gives organizations a bird’s-eye view of enterprise security posture regarding AI and enables security teams to take necessary action to mitigate risk exposure.

AISPM is essentially a hybrid of security practices and controls that is tailored for the AI lifecycle, from development to deployment. This includes making the training data secure, protecting model parameters, and prohibiting inference attacks.

Why is AI security posture management important?

The growing reliance on AI systems to perform important business functions or make critical decisions has made AI security posture management a must-have. AI models commonly handle sensitive customer data, make financial decisions, determine access to resources, and enable critical infrastructure. Securing these systems becomes paramount because they can easily fall prey to attackers who may exploit security weaknesses to steal information, affect outcomes, or disrupt system operations.

The impact of AI security breaches is not only direct monetary loss but also regulatory action, reputation damage, and a decrease in customer trust. With AI regulation growing worldwide, organizations will have higher obligations around securing their AI systems and proving compliance. AISPM enables organizations to fulfil these obligations by continuous monitoring, documenting, and evidencing security controls in place, as well as records demonstrating due-diligence efforts in protecting AI assets. Such an approach prevents security incidents but also lays the groundwork for responsible AI deployment, which meets both business goals and compliance needs.

Difference between AI-SPM, DSPM, CSPM, and ASPM

AI-SPM or AI security posture management deals exclusively with the responsible security of AI systems, models, and the AI management lifecycle. It also offers new challenges, such as model poisoning, adversarial attacks, and vulnerabilities that are specific to AI.

AI-SPM tools can keep watch over the AI training pipelines, model deployments, and inference services, as well as ensure the integrity of the AI decisions. They allow organizations to pinpoint when AI models may become vulnerable to compromise or when they could drift from their design to create security hazards.

Data security posture management (DSPM) focuses on protecting data assets throughout the organization. DSPM tools identify, categorize, and keep track of sensitive data irrespective of its location. They monitor the data flows and access patterns and have compliance status as well and may help in ensuring sufficient data protection controls. Even though DSPM covers in-flight data that AI systems may consume, it does not cover the AI models themselves or their unique security implications.

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) concentrates on protecting cloud infrastructure and services. These tools are meant to find misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security gaps existing in cloud deployments. CSPM solutions can help avoid common errors like exposed storage buckets or over-permissive IAM policies. Instead, they focus on securing infrastructure where AI systems may run and are not directly aimed at the security of AI models or the data processing pipelines feeding into the models.

Attack surface posture management (ASPM) covers all attack surfaces by continuously discovering, monitoring, and securing entry points across the entire organization. ASPM tools detect the assets and vulnerabilities exposed to the environment along with the security gaps attackers may exploit. ASPM helps understand the overall security surface. However, it does not have the granular functionalities to protect specific components for those unique AI risks.

Key Components and Functionalities of AI SPM

The effectiveness of AI security posture management depends on several critical components working together to protect AI systems throughout their lifecycle. Let’s examine the key elements that make up a comprehensive AI-SPM solution.

Continuous security posture assessment

Continuous security posture assessment enables real-time insight into the security posture of AI systems through continuous scans and monitoring. This module scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security gaps in AI models, training pipelines, and deployment environments on a recurring basis. It gathers security telemetry from all of those data sources and compares the current state to security baselines and best practices.

Automated vulnerability management

Automated vulnerability management finds and remediates vulnerabilities in AI systems prior to an attacker leveraging one of the weaknesses. This component performs a scan of the AI infrastructure, the code that makes up the application, and the models that act as the resulting application for known vulnerabilities using tools designed to detect AI posture.

Configuration drift detection

Configuration drift detection detects changes in the settings of AI systems that may pose security risks. Keep track of changes not only to model parameters but also to access control settings and deployment environment settings and send notifications to teams when models are auto-deployed that have configuration parameters that differ from the approved baseline.

Risk prioritization and scoring

By scoring all the different possible threats, security teams can prioritize which risks they need to address first. At this stage of the assessment, it calculates risk scores based on various factors such as the severity of a vulnerability, potential impact on the business, ease to exploit, and sensitivity of data impacted.

Security policy enforcement

Enforced security policy ensures that the AI systems adhere to the organization’s security requirements as well as industry standards. This element includes enforcement and monitoring of the security policies for AI development and deployment. It enforces controls such as access control, encryption mandates, and data governance across the AI environment.

Why Implement AI SPM?

As AI deployments grow and mature, organizations in every industry have compelling reasons to adopt AI SPM. Organizations that adopt AI-SPM solutions usually have several decisive business requirements and security needs that traditional solutions are unable to solve effectively.

Growing complexity of threat landscape

The threat landscape against AI systems has become more dynamic and complex. Now, attackers are using specific methods that use AI weaknesses, such as model inversion, membership inference, or prompt injection attacks. With attackers finding ways to subvert the AI system and extract sensitive training data, tamper with AI outputs, or cause the system to make decisions that result in harm to others, organizations are under threat.

Speed and scale advantages over manual approaches

AI systems deployed in distributed environments may process millions of transactions or decisions each day. These systems require AI-SPM tools to provide automated monitoring that scales with them as they continuously analyze security telemetry at machine speed. They can scan AI infrastructures in minutes, identify subtle differences over vast datasets, and act on threats before they can cause major harm.

Predictive capabilities and proactive defense

Using sophisticated analytics, AI-SPM solutions recognize all the potential security threats and minimize the likelihood of breaches. Using behavior patterns from system evolution, end-user interactions, and other environmental factors, these tools predict the potential points of compromise.

Resource optimization and cost efficiency

The use of AI-SPM lowers the security cost by targeting scarce resources where the value is highest. Automation features take the burden off routine security tasks that would take large chunks of time from the staff, like scanning for misconfigurations, compliance checks, and generating security reports.

Reduced alert fatigue and false positives

When traditional security tools are applied to AI systems, they generate an overwhelming number of alerts, most of them false positives. Due to this alert noise, security analysts are left to investigate harmless anomalies and end up wasting time while missing real threats.

How AI Enhances Traditional Security Posture Management

Manual and rule-based security approaches have always been limited and are therefore uniquely suited by the capabilities that AI brings.

Real-time analysis and response

With real-time analysis, security systems are able to analyze and act on security data as soon as it is created, avoiding the delays of batch processing or manual review. These tools use AI to monitor activities in systems, traffic in networks, and behaviors from users in the AI environment. An automated response can even act immediately when a threat is detected by blocking suspicious connections, isolating infected systems, or revoking compromised credentials.

Pattern recognition across vast datasets

With the ability to recognize patterns, security teams can find implicit relationships in security-related data that human detection could never. This means that AI security tools that analyze historical security events in the context of attack chains learn what those chains look like and then apply this to the data flows that they process in real time. They can correlate millions of events in order to map between seemingly unrelated activities that create security threats.

Anomaly detection beyond rule-based systems

Whereas security is limited to operating within the pre-defined rules, anomaly detection expands outside those boundaries to detect abnormal behaviors that indicate potential threats. AI-SPM is a system that learns what is typical for the normal operation of the AI and the AI user behavior to form baselines. It then marks deviations from these baselines for investigation, even when they fail to meet the criteria for a recognized attack.

Predictive threat intelligence

Predictive threat intelligence takes a look at past and current security events to predict the possibility of a security incident before it occurs. With this knowledge, AI security systems parse data for patterns in attack methods, system weaknesses, and security signals to predict where threats may appear next.

Automated remediation recommendations

If it finds a security issue, AI-SPM analyzes the context and provides specific recommendations for fixing the root cause. The recommendations contain the specifics to mitigate common vulnerabilities, resolve misconfigured assets, or update the security controls.

Contextual Alert Prioritization

With contextual alert prioritization, it is easy to differentiate between grave threats and minor issues, which ultimately reduces alert fatigue. AI SPM applies true-to-life risk scoring and gives risk-based groupings that demonstrate an entire storyline of an attack, as opposed to just alerts.

Challenges in AI SPM Implementation

AI Security Posture Management has its advantages, but organizations run into several hurdles when deploying these solutions. Awareness of these obstacles enables security teams to plan and strategize accordingly to take advantage of their AI-SPM.

Data quality and quantity requirements

AI-SPM requires exhaustive knowledge of AI assets, network traffic, user behaviors, and security events to create baselines with precision and understand the significance of deviations. Security logs are often flawed, duplicative, or incomplete, creating challenges for analysis engines.

Integration with existing security infrastructure

Not many organizations have a simplified security stack; rather, they have complex environments of tooling from different vendors that were not designed to work together. Teams are struggling to integrate the AI SPM with enterprise security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, endpoint protection, network monitoring, and identity management systems. API limitations, inconsistencies in data formats, and variations in synchronization methods among systems contribute to technical barriers.

Skills gap and talent acquisition

AI-SPM implementation requires proactive security, AI, and data science to ensure success and meaningful progress.  AI engineers may not appreciate the security implications of their design decisions. The lack of skills hinders organizations in configuring, tuning, and interpreting the results of AI-SPM tools.

Explainability and transparency of AI decisions

AI security tools lower the transparency, which causes more problems for the security teams as in why was anything flagged as suspicious or why the particular remediation was suggested. While validating the findings generated by AI, it becomes difficult for security analysts to confirm what led to the discovery if they do not have visibility on what detection logic was applied to the events.

Potential for adversarial attacks against AI systems

AI security tools have their own vulnerabilities, with cybercriminals creating new steganography techniques to obtain AI evasion. All this means is that adversarial examples can either be specially crafted inputs that are designed to misclassify, or they can be techniques used to poison training data and introduce backdoors to AI components of security tools. This may lead AI-SPM systems to overlook actual attacks or produce so many false positives that they inundate security teams.

Best Practices for AI SPM

AI SPM needs to be implemented in a strategic way to overcome the challenges. Established best practices enable organizations to leverage the security value of OS controls while minimizing the effort and resources needed to implement them.

Establishing clear security objectives and metrics

Before deploying AI-SPM, organizations need to set specific, measurable security objectives. These goals must be related to business priorities, and that poses the highest risk to AI systems. There are specific metrics that must be tracked to monitor the progress toward a better security posture and key performance indicators related to the fact that an organization should watch out for.

Data preparation and normalization strategies

Clean, consistent security data is important for successful AI-SPM. The organizations must have appropriate logging formats to be implemented, ensure data quality, and lastly maintain a process for missing data. Through data normalization, the security events coming from diverse sources start using the same lexicon and structure, thus making the analysis more accurate and reliable.

Regular model training and validation

AI detection models need to be actively maintained over time in order to stay effective in the face of changing threats and environments. Security teams bolstered by automation must then continuously retrain models with new data, benchmark against known use cases, and refine detection thresholds.

Phased implementation approach

AI-SPM capabilities should be deployed in phases based on the implementation of processes rather than attempting complete implementation in one go by businesses. Deployment can be gradual, starting with visibility, then asset discovery, followed by threat detection, and finally, automated remediation.

Cross-Functional collaboration

AI-SPM needs collaboration between security experts, data scientists, and AI engineers. As such, organizations should establish collaborative structures where these teams exchange knowledge and cultivate mutual security goals. Such collaboration helps ensure that security requirements are addressed in the AI lifecycle.

How SentinelOne Can Help

Through a single platform, SentinelOne protects the entirety of the AI supply chain, ensuring comprehensive AI security posture management. It offers seamless visibility through AI development environments, training pipelines, and production deployments to locate vulnerabilities, identify threats, and apply security policies.

While many solutions rely on behavioral AI, the SentinelOne platform combines it with deep detection technologies that comprehensively understand the unique security requirements of each specific machine learning ecosystem to quickly detect threats like model poisoning attempts, data extraction attacks, and unauthorized modification of the model.

With SentinelOne, organizations automatically have security that grows with their AI initiatives while keeping human oversight to a minimum. By integrating seamlessly with existing security tools and AI frameworks, the platform solves the integration issues that often slow security implementations. SentinelOne real-time protection, contextual alerts, and guided remediation allow security teams to bridge the AI security skills gap without compromising the security of their most prized AI assets.

Conclusion

AI security posture management is a critical evolution in the security practices of any organization deploying AI systems. With AI technology becoming integral to all types of business processes across many sectors, the protection of these systems must be approached in a special manner that recognizes that these types of technology have their own distinct types of risks that must be mitigated. AI-SPM will help organizations gain insight into their AI security posture, decrease exposure to new types of threats, and prove compliance with changing regulations.

Although challenges do exist, they can be addressed with intention through careful planning, a phased approach, and the assistance of security vendors versed in the AI security landscape. Organizations should adopt best practices and purpose-built solutions to shore up AI investments and sustain trust in AI-enabled services. By taking control of security in this way, organizations can avoid expensive breaches while also facilitating faster and more confident AI adoption that can give businesses a boost of innovation while reducing the threat associated with the rapid development of AI technology.