Cybersecurity aspects in the new Executive Order about AI
The race between US and UE
On 30 October 2023, the President of the United States issued an Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. The Executive Order establishes new standards for Artificial Intelligence safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world, and more. The Executive Order builds on previous actions the President has taken, including work that led to voluntary commitments from 15 leading companies to drive safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI.
At the beginning of October 2023 a fine of almost PLN 5.2 million was imposed by the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection on the Scandinavian distributor of supplements and PLN 110,000 on its president of the management board for using dark patterns in e-commerce.
The regulator found seven such practices in the activities of the company selling dietary supplements. The regulator assessed that consumers could be misled by the first contact with the company’s offer, boasting “over a million satisfied customers” of a given product, while this information concerned the total number of the entrepreneur’s customers. Some marketing materials also referred to alleged recommendations of the European Food Safety Authority. Above all, the manipulation of the fined company consisted in offering a free sample of a dietary supplement. When the consumer clicked to confirm his willingness to receive it, a new window opened – with a message similar to the previous one in terms of graphic form and content, but it did not concern a free sample, but an annual paid supply of a given product along with a subscription.
Being one of the most popular topics of the last years in technology, blockchain offers great perspectives but still remains often seen as vague, complicated matter. Not going into details, it can be surely stated that it is not as complicated as it may seem, both in understanding and especially in application. In a nutshell, blockchain is a technology which secures sharing of information, storing data in a digital database on a distributed ledger of blocks. It allows mostly to record transactions or track assets of various kinds. Importantly, it runs completely online but is properly secured: all information stored is cryptographically coded and to access specific data you need to use your own, private key which is authenticated by network.
That being said, the most important application for blockchain is now cryptocurrency, the most known being bitcoin. The very existence and operation of crypto depend on the blockchain technology. Nowadays, it is not just growing popularity of fashionable crypto assets but an actual growth in the use of this technology in business. In 2022, there were estimated 2,353 businesses in the US accepting bitcoin and the number is believed to grow. Cryptocurrencies are being used by different brands, for different purposes: from purchasing tickets or non-fungible tokens to even buying real estate. The scope of possibilities may be not unlimited but certainly is bound to be increasingly broader.
Zero-Knowledge Proof is a method by which one party can prove to another party that a given statement is true, while avoiding conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of the statement’s truth.
In blockchain, Zero-Knowledge Proof is used to enhance privacy, security, and scalability by enabling confidential transactions, private data management, and leveraging specific applications such as zkRollups.
There are two parties – prover and verifier. The prover convinces verifier of a statement’s truth without revealing extra information. Whereas, the verifier validates the proof without learning more thanks to the statement’s validity.
One example for zero-knowledge authentication is when a prover has an asymmetric key-pair (e.g. RSA, EC) and using the private key (the identifying secret) to respond to a challenge sent with the public key. The private key is never revealed, but the verifier is convinced that the prover has the key.
According to many descriptions, artificial intelligence (AI) is “the ability of machines to demonstrate human skills, the ability to spontaneously adapt to changing conditions, make complex decisions, learn, and undertake abstract reasoning.” However, this is not a completely precise description, because it is difficult to define something that has so many possibilities and applications and has such a wide range of uses. This is even more difficult because there is no single specific definition of the word “intelligence.”
Currently, some of the most interesting applications of artificial intelligence are:
– games in which artificial intelligence is the opponent of the player who plays “against the computer”, not other players;
– all types of home appliances connected to the WI-FI network, such as cleaning robots, refrigerators or air purifiers;
– autonomous cars that can move without a driver inside;
– online stores where “customer assistants” in the form of chat with artificial intelligence (so-called chat bots) are available.
