Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries and enhancing human capabilities, but it also introduces significant security challenges. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, ensuring its safety and trustworthiness is essential. Microsoft is dedicated to delivering comprehensive AI security solutions, focusing on its Trustworthy AI framework to protect AI systems and data. This blog post explores Microsoft's approach to AI security and the available tools and capabilities.
Key Takeaways
Microsoft's Focus on Trustworthy AI: Microsoft is prioritizing the development and deployment of AI that is secure, safe, and private to unlock AI’s positive impact on organizations and communities.
Secure Future Initiative (SFI): Microsoft's expanded SFI underscores the company-wide commitment to prioritize security, guided by principles like secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations.
New AI Security Capabilities: Microsoft is releasing new product capabilities to strengthen the security, safety, and privacy of AI systems, including evaluations in Azure AI Studio and transparency into web queries for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps discover AI attack surfaces, strengthen AI security posture, and protect AI apps against threats. It identifies AI infrastructure and prevents attacks on AI applications. It also monitors AI applications for anomalous activity and alerts to malicious activity.
Microsoft Purview AI Hub: Microsoft Purview provides visibility into AI application usage and helps safeguard data by delivering insights such as sensitive data shared with AI applications, the number of users interacting with AI apps, and associated risk levels.
AI Compliance Assessments in Microsoft Purview: New Compliance Manager assessment templates are available to help assess and strengthen compliance with AI regulations and standards, including EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 23894:2023, and ISO/IEC 42001.
Unified Security Operations Platform: Microsoft provides a unified security operations platform that integrates SIEM, XDR, security posture management, and generative AI for end-to-end threat protection.
Microsoft Copilot for Security Integrations: Greater integration of Copilot across the Microsoft security portfolio provides richer embedded experiences and Copilot capabilities from familiar and trusted products.
End-to-End AI Security: Microsoft is the first security provider to deliver end-to-end AI security posture management, threat protection, data security, and governance for AI.
Customer adoption: Customers like Cummins, EPAM Systems, Unity, ASOS, New York City Public Schools, and South Australia Department for Education are already using Microsoft solutions to build more secure and trustworthy AI applications
Microsoft's Trustworthy AI Framework
Microsoft's approach to AI is rooted in the principle of Trustworthy AI, which encompasses four essential pillars: security, safety, privacy, and compliance. These pillars are interconnected and form the foundation for building and deploying AI systems that organizations and individuals can rely on.
Security: Protecting AI systems from cyber threats, unauthorized access, and malicious activities.
Safety: Ensuring AI systems operate reliably and without causing harm or unintended consequences.
Privacy: Safeguarding sensitive data used by AI systems and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
Compliance: Adhering to relevant laws, regulations, and ethical standards governing AI development and deployment.
Security First: Protecting AI Systems
Security is Microsoft's top priority, especially in the age of AI. The company's commitment to security is underscored by the Secure Future Initiative (SFI), a company-wide effort to make the world a safer place for everyone.
The SFI is guided by three core principles:
Secure by Design: Building security into the AI system from the outset.
Secure by Default: Configuring AI systems with secure settings and controls enabled by default.
Secure Operations: Continuously monitoring and improving the security posture of AI systems.
Microsoft provides a range of tools and capabilities to help organizations secure their AI systems.
Microsoft Defender and Purview
These solutions offer foundational security controls, including built-in functions to prevent prompt injections and copyright violations. They also automate the classification, tagging, and labeling of data to strengthen data security and governance.
Azure AI Studio
This platform provides evaluation tools to support proactive risk assessments, enabling developers to identify and mitigate potential security vulnerabilities early in the AI development lifecycle.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
This AI-powered productivity tool provides transparency into web queries, helping users understand how web search enhances Copilot responses and ensuring data protection policies are applied.
AI Security Posture Management with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
This capability helps organizations discover AI attack surfaces, strengthen their AI security posture, and protect AI applications against threats. It continuously monitors AI applications for anomalous activity, correlates findings, and enriches security alerts with supporting evidence.
Ensuring AI Safety: Mitigating Risks and Undesirable Behaviors
Microsoft's commitment to AI safety is reflected in its Responsible AI Principles, established in 2018. These principles guide the company in building and deploying AI systems that are reliable, fair, and free from harmful content, bias, and misuse. Microsoft invests significantly in governance, policies, tools, and processes to uphold these principles.
To help customers pursue the benefits of AI while mitigating risks, Microsoft offers the following capabilities:
Azure AI Content Safety: This service includes a Correction capability in its Groundedness detection feature, which helps fix hallucination issues in real-time before users see them.
Embedded Content Safety: This feature allows customers to embed Azure AI Content Safety on devices, which is crucial for scenarios with intermittent or unavailable cloud connectivity.
Protected Material Detection for Code: This feature, now in preview in Azure AI Content Safety, helps detect pre-existing content and code, fostering collaboration and transparency while enabling more informed coding decisions.
Data Privacy in the Age of AI
Data is the foundation of AI, and Microsoft prioritizes protecting customer data and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations5. The company's long-standing privacy principles include user control, transparency, and legal and regulatory protections.
Microsoft offers several capabilities to enhance data privacy in AI systems:
Confidential Inferencing in Azure OpenAI Service
This feature, now in preview, enables customers to develop generative AI applications that support verifiable end-to-end privacy. It ensures that sensitive customer data remains secure and private during the inferencing process.
Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs
These virtual machines, now generally available, allow customers to secure data directly on the GPU, building on Microsoft's confidential computing solutions. They ensure that customer data stays encrypted and protected in a secure environment.
Azure OpenAI Data Zones
These data zones, coming soon for the EU and US, build on the existing data residency provided by Azure OpenAI Service. They offer customers the flexibility of scaling generative AI applications across all Azure regions within geography while giving them control over data processing and storage within the EU or US.
Microsoft Purview AI Hub
Delivers insights such as sensitive data shared with AI applications.
Compliance with AI Regulations
As AI regulations evolve, Microsoft is committed to helping organizations comply with relevant laws and standards. The company offers AI compliance assessments in Microsoft Purview to help organizations assess, implement, and strengthen compliance with AI regulations6.
Four new Compliance Manager assessment templates are available to help organizations comply with:
EU AI Act
NIST AI RMF
ISO/IEC 23894:2023
ISO/IEC 42001
Unified Security Operations Platform
Microsoft integrates all of the foundational SOC tools—cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM), comprehensive native extended detection and response (XDR), unified security posture management, and generative AI—to deliver true end-to-end threat protection in a single platform, with a common data model, and a unified analyst experience. The new unified security operations platform experience transforms the real-world analyst experience with a simple, approachable user experience that brings together all the security signals and threat intelligence currently stuck in other tools.
Microsoft Copilot for Security offers a great advantage, providing richer embedded experiences and Copilot capabilities from familiar and trusted products. New Microsoft Copilot for Security integrations, including Purview, new partner plugins, Azure Firewall, and Azure Web Application Firewall, provide security teams with real-time guidance, deeper investigative insights, and expanded access to data from across the environment.
Customer Success Stories
Many organizations are already leveraging Microsoft's AI security solutions to protect their AI systems and data:
Cummins: This engine manufacturing company uses Microsoft Purview to strengthen data security and governance by automating the classification, tagging, and labeling of data.
EPAM Systems: This software engineering company deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot for 300 users, citing the data protection they get from Microsoft as a key reason.
Unity: This platform for 3D games uses Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to build Muse Chat, an AI assistant that makes game development easier. Muse Chat uses content-filtering models in Azure AI Content Safety to ensure responsible use of the software.
ASOS: This fashion retailer uses the built-in content filters in Azure AI Content Safety to support top-quality interactions through an AI app that helps customers find new looks.
New York City Public Schools and South Australia Department for Education: These educational institutions partnered with Microsoft to develop chat systems that are safe and appropriate for the education context, relying on the same infrastructure to ensure safe use for students and teachers.
F5 and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC): F5 is using Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs to build advanced AI-powered security solutions, while ensuring confidentiality of the data its models are analyzing. RBC has integrated Azure confidential computing into their own platform to analyze encrypted data while preserving customer privacy.
Conclusion: Achieving More with Trustworthy AI
AI offers tremendous potential to drive innovation and improve lives, but it also presents significant security challenges. Microsoft is committed to providing comprehensive AI security solutions that enable organizations to harness the power of AI responsibly. By focusing on security, safety, privacy, and compliance, Microsoft helps customers build and deploy Trustworthy AI systems that are secure, reliable, and aligned with ethical principles. With new capabilities that improve security, safety and privacy, Microsoft continues to enable customers to use and build trustworthy AI solutions that help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.
Comments