Cyber and Physical Security Converge

AI Advances Convergence of Cyber and Physical Security

June 13, 2024

Georganne Benesch

physical security

The advancement of AI technology is driving a transformational shift and impacting every industry, including the security industry. As we navigate the changes and opportunities, our approach and practices will need to change with them. To help us navigate this new world, we talk to Kasia Hanson, Global Sr. Director, Physical and Cybersecurity Ecosystems at Intel.

Hanson is an influencer on the forefront of the global security industry. In 2024 she was included for the third time by the Security Industry Association on the Women in Security Forum “Power 100” List for advancing diversity, inclusion, innovation, and leadership in the community. Her work at Intel is all about helping the ecosystem grow, advance, and leverage the latest security technologies by creating an advanced portfolio of solutions with Intel’s ecosystem of partners. Kasia also advises integrators and security practitioners on converged practices and AI in security. We talk about the changing dynamics in the world of physical security, including the convergence of physical and cybersecurity, and Intel’s role in helping customers and partners overcome the challenges today and capitalize on opportunities in the future.

Let’s start out by talking about the convergence of physical security and cybersecurity.

As the threat landscape continues to grow, AI is a tool for security teams to detect, respond, and mitigate threats, but the bad actors are also using AI to perpetrate attacks. As AI permeates all aspects of our world, threats continue to get more and more sophisticated, and we must protect both physical and digital assets.

The broad adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) has created an interconnected ecosystem of physical and cyber systems, blurring the lines between physical and cyber. Security threats are evolving and going lower in the stack. They are aimed at physical vulnerabilities. As physical security and cybersecurity are increasingly interrelated, it’s no longer viable to separate cybersecurity and physical security policies and practices.

With the landscape and threats evolving quickly, we aim to arm security practitioners with tools to create layers of defense—whether it’s integrated silicon security and product assurance or advising on holistic security practices and solutions. Our goal is to help the defenders defend.

What big security challenges do organizations face?

Security organizations are faced with many challenges from ransomware, insider threats, malware and viruses, supply chain attacks, data breaches, unauthorized attacks and intrusions, physical sabotage, tailgating and social engineering, facility breaches, device tampering, and environment (fire, weather). Both the CSO and CISO are charged with protecting all facets of their organizations, so formal collaboration between the physical and cybersecurity teams is critical to improve efficiency and resiliency and achieve a greater return on their security investments.

As new AI and computer vision technologies are developed and deployed to combat security threats, how are organizations complying with privacy regulations and laws?

There are a couple of areas to this. The first is the ethical development of AI. This should be the number-one priority in the development and use of AI in any scenario. We all play a role to ensure that AI is being developed in an ethical and equitable way with trustworthy systems. I invite you to read more about Intel’s responsible AI policies and approach.

To help security practitioners protect data and privacy, Intel builds security features into our hardware and software, so data can be protected and compliant with privacy laws such as GDPR in Europe and industry-specific regulatory requirements like healthcare and financial services. Confidential computing can help practitioners protect data and stay compliant with regulatory requirements. For example, Intel^® Software Guard Extensions (Intel^® SGX) unlocks new opportunities for business collaboration and insights—even with sensitive or regulated data. Intel SGX is the most researched and updated confidential computing technology in data centers on the market today, and with the smallest trust boundary.

And Intel^® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel^® TDX), helps to increase confidentiality at the VM level, enhance privacy, and gain control over your data. It enables isolation of the guest OS and VM applications, which removes access from the cloud host, hypervisor, and other VMs on the platform.

What are some examples of the types of partners you work with?

Intel has an extensive ecosystem, including ODM, OEM, ISV, and systems integrator partners delivering innovative solutions that help security practitioners add layers of defense and deliver new business value. We work with the ecosystem to bring innovative software capabilities that can leverage both hardware and software and provide new outcomes in a more secure way.

Software has created an opportunity for the market to offer more advanced business outcomes, lower total cost of ownership, and accelerate time to market. We work with ISVs to help them develop AI and computer vison capabilities using the Intel^® OpenVINO^™ toolkit and the Intel^® Geti^™ platform model training at the edge. Then there’s Intel^® SceneScape, a new software tool enabling vision-based AI to have spatial awareness from sensor data and provide live updates to a 4D digital twin of your physical space.

The security ecosystem serves many different verticals, and we work with the ecosystem to deliver optimized solutions that serve markets such as retail, manufacturing, education, and healthcare. Genetec, for example, serves education, cities, government, entertainment venues, and commercial businesses. Its Genetec Security Center is an open-architecture platform that unifies security systems, sensors, and data into a single interface. This includes IP-based video, access control, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), intrusion detection, intercoms, and more. We work closely with them to optimize their software and hardware with Intel technology, accelerating new business outcomes for security practitioners.

Another partner we work with is Axis Communications, one of the leading camera vendors in the world. We can leverage their cameras with Intel SceneScape for scene intelligence and move beyond traditional vision-based AI. This leads to realizing spatial awareness from sensor data and into a 4D digital twin—creating new opportunities for security practitioners. We also work with AI ISVs like EPIC iO, which delivers advanced analytics use cases. We’ve helped them optimize their software capabilities with OpenVINO as well as validated the company’s solutions on Intel-based Dell hardware. Working hand in hand with them enables us to deliver new business outcomes at the edge using advanced capabilities.

We also work with the cybersecurity ecosystem to develop solutions on Intel platforms with software optimization. Check out the latest Cybersecurity Ecosystem Catalog to see how we are working with partners like CrowdStrike to protect endpoints leveraging Intel Threat Detection Technology.

In closing, is there anything else you would like to add?

The cyber and physical security landscape is changing faster than ever. When I advise our partner ecosystem on AI and security technologies, I always reference being on a journey together. Intel is uniquely positioned to lead the technology industry in a security evolution due to our vast product portfolio and end-to-end ownership in product development. We believe that system trust is rooted in security—if hardware isn’t secure, then a system cannot be secure. That’s why our goal is to build the most secure hardware on the planet, enabled by software—and we’ve made unparalleled investments in people, processes, and products to meet this goal.

According to ABI Research, Intel leads the silicon industry in product security assurance. I invite anyone making security product decisions to review the latest ABI Research report: Embracing Security as a Core Component of the Tech You Buy and the Intel 2023 Product Security Report.