The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has released a new report on the potential of Large Language Model (LLM)–powered AI in offensive security. The report examines AI’s capabilities across five critical security phases: reconnaissance, scanning, vulnerability analysis, exploitation, and reporting. AI is here to transform offensive security; however, it’s not a silver bullet,” said Adam Lundqvist, a lead author of the paper.
Because AI solutions are limited by the scope of their training data and algorithms, it’s essential to understand the current state-of-the-art of AI and leverage it as an augmentation tool for human security professionals.
The report identifies challenges such as a shortage of skilled security professionals, increasingly complex environments, and the need to balance automation with manual testing. It highlights AI’s potential to augment human capabilities through data analysis, code, text generation, planning attack scenarios, reasoning, and tool orchestration. Leveraging AI in offensive security enhances scalability, efficiency, speed, discovery of more complex vulnerabilities, and ultimately, the overall security posture,” Lundqvist added.
However, the report also emphasizes that no single AI solution can revolutionize offensive security today.
Leveraging AI in offensive security
Continuous experimentation with AI is essential to find and implement effective solutions.
The report advocates for robust governance, risk, and compliance frameworks to overcome current limitations, such as token window constraints in AI models. The authors recommend that organizations incorporate AI to automate tasks and augment human capabilities, maintain human oversight to validate AI outputs and implement robust frameworks to ensure safe, secure, and ethical AI use. “While AI offers significant potential to enhance offensive security capabilities, it is crucial to acknowledge the difficulties arising from its use.”
Mitigation strategies, such as those covered in this report, can help ensure AI’s safe and effective integration into security frameworks,” said Kirti Chopra, a lead author of the paper. The Cloud Security Alliance is dedicated to raising awareness and defining best practices to ensure a secure cloud computing environment. By leveraging industry expertise and its extensive network, CSA provides research, education, training, certification, events, and products to benefit the entire cloud community.
