Have you considered opportunities to evolve your organization’s security posture using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)?  GenAI could simultaneously help reduce risk and improve effectiveness of developers, managers, and security teams. Within security operations, GenAI can help threat intelligence, risk management, system event monitoring, and IT maintenance teams be more efficient and focus on what’s most important.  

use case for genai

 

GenAI can help developers

DevOps teams can use GenAI to help prevent, detect and fix security bugs in code they’ve written and technology components from other sources such as colleagues or a third-party. GenAI tools such as Oracle Code Assist can help to improve the security of code and other technology components in multiple ways, such as:

  • Educate: GenAI can identify, explain and give examples of common coding weaknesses such as OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities.
  • Analyze code: GenAI can review, annotate and summarize existing code to help you understand what others have written, and where mistakes may be present.
  • Suggest solutions: GenAI can even propose draft functions for you, allowing you to compare your existing work to generated content and consider improvements.
  • Write test cases: Testing code can be challenging. You can use GenAI to generate routine tests for common issues to potentially save you time. It can also offer a new perspective, such as identify tests for additional issues you may not have considered yet. This can help to boost the quality of your code/product, which can increase customer satisfaction.

 

GenAI can help guide security activities

People in DevOps, compliance and security teams may take advantage of GenAI to help drive efficiency and operational excellence, while advancing security posture. GenAI can help people make well-informed decisions, and help teams focus on what matters most. Leaning on the document analysis strengths of large language models (LLMs), these are some possible use cases:

  • Prioritize risks and tasks: Frequent concerns and problem areas can be highlighted by LLMs, allowing you to focus resources on the more likely challenges. This can enable groups to sort and prioritize the many demands for their time and resources.
  • Summarize requirements: GenAI can be used to succinctly draft summaries of policies, standards, processes and similar documented requirements. It can even help determine the differences between standards and versions of the same standard, highlighting what’s new.
  • Provide “how-to” guidance: Security-focused GenAI chatbots can provide guidance about policies and procedures and assist people in finding the right document for their needs.

 

GenAI can support vulnerability management

A vulnerability is a weakness in a technology component itself (product vulnerabilities) or in the way that component is operated (environment vulnerabilities) which could be exploited by a malicious actor to compromise data confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Vulnerability management is an essential aspect of security operations because it helps to protect data.

 

Any type of computing environment may have vulnerabilities, so it is important to protect not just production systems but also build, develop, demo, and test environments. This is especially critical for non-production environments that process any production data or sensitive data such as health or financial information. There are several opportunities for leveraging GenAI in vulnerability management activities:

  • Identify common vulnerabilities and mistakes: Knowing which issues are most likely to be encountered can help focus your resources on the more likely problems. For example, Oracle Code Assist can identify common vulnerabilities such as unpatched systems, weak passwords, insufficient access controls, SQL injection and weak encryption protocols.
  • Provide examples of specific vulnerabilities: Having GenAI provide real world examples of specific vulnerabilities, while explaining how they work and how to prevent them, can help accelerate your activities to prevent and remediate vulnerabilities in code/products and in environment operations.
  • Suggest test plans: Leveraging your list of common vulnerabilities, GenAI can offer example test steps and methodologies to help you detect these weaknesses.

Recommendations

Consider the above and other opportunities in your current development, IT and security operations that could benefit from GenAI capabilities.

  1. Learn how to utilize policies, standards, processes and procedures in 4 Power Tools for Security Leaders.
  2. Explore risk-based vulnerability management practices.
  3. Understand the importance of security patch management.
  4. Sign up for an OCI account and get free cloud credits to try Oracle AI services, including generative AI.