AI, ML, and Quantum computing: Transforming Cybersecurity Landscape & Bridging the gap

good afternoon everyone and thank you for showing up to this panel discussion today uh it's a pleasure to be here and I was really happy when Hima asked IFI moderate the panel on behalf of you know wh's uh western Canada affiliate um so Business Leaders are talking about it Educators seem to be paralyzed by it um even artists like Drake are expressing expressing uh frustration with it I'm talking about AI right um and then there's Quantum Computing we've been talking about it for the last decade or two it's supposed to be impending it's supposed to blow up all of our encryption and you know allow us to also make stronger ones it's supposed to be you know the dawn of of a

new era and um both of these technologies have an impact on cyber security and so our aim today is to really get a general understanding of what we talk about when we talk about AI when when we talk about generative AI when we talk about Quantum Computing and specifically how it affects or how it potentially will affect cyber security all right so that's what we're going to do we have limited time so we're going to try to be as efficient as possible we're going to break this up into three sections so we'll have introductions and I'll introduce it to our wonderful panelists and then we'll go into a series of questions and then finally we'll have some time for you to be

involved so if you've got some questions you know start thinking about it jot it down we'll try to get to it at the end um before I get into introductions though I wanted to mention that Celia wlay was supposed to be with us today uh but she had an emergency in her family on the weekend and so she couldn't make it so we just send her thoughts out to her and hope that she'll be able to join us maybe at a future besides Edmonton panel all right so are we ready all right so I'm going to just pass out these little cards to my panelist is here and for the audience I would just like you to turn to your

neighbor all right and if you're not sitting close to anyone come on get cozy all right don't be scared and um when I say the word AI artificial intelligence just tell your neighbor like what comes to your mind what's one word that comes to your mind okay so do that and I'll have the panelists they writing their words and they'll share them with us in a little bit it's okay we can have fun with it all right so I hope you have your one word for AI don't shout it out yet now I'm going to say Quantum Computing what comes to mind also hold your word all right so anyone wanting to share when I say AI what comes to mind

one word Tyle robots all [Applause] right love it unemployment chat GPT I knew it right OPP opportun there we go Terminator transforming oh two words okay hello all right what about Quant okay one more sky oh I know we're going to go Terminator all right what about Quantum computing physical physical disaster disaster pant get ready anything else for Quantum Computing oh I like how you think all right so you know when we listen to those words around the rooms we've got like the enthusiasts and then we have you know just a little bit more trepidation right some of us are a little bit like I don't know if I trust this so I want to introduce our panelist

today all right and I'm going to just to start with who's closest to me right um let me get my notes here I'm sitting right next to Puja sha she is a seconde graduate student at Concordia University of Edmonton and she's pursuing her master's degree in information system Security Management she specializes in the administration of endpoint security and data loss prevention tools um leading the global data at rest function at Visa Inc um she has an unwavering passion for information security and that fuels her Comm commitment to staying a breast of the latest developments in the field ensuring that she can make substantial contributions to its fostering secure digital environments fua welcome to the stage

and why don't you just tell us a little bit about why you chose the words that you do that you did sorry just you could you know sh hold your card up tell us what what's on your mind thank you so the word that I chose for artificial intelligence is future it definitely seems like a future so and the word that I chose for uh Quantum Computing it's revolutionary it's going to make a lot of changes and so many different fields so yeah thanks Puja I'm sure that that resonates with a lot of you all right next to fuja is forant no stranger to the bside stage I know that he had a talk yesterday today

I think he has a talk every year maybe several right we're very happy to have you pant he has a bachelor's and MERS in it and 14 years of it experience here in Canada acoss across various industry um politicals he works as a senior cyber security adviser for a Fortune 500 and has numerous research papers in the field of quantum Computing a YouTube channel so check it out he calls himself a geek with a purpose he likes to support budding Talent share his experience and continue continue to progress the cyber security discipline in Industry Academia and research pant what did you write on your card and tell us why okay uh nikisha before I do that

you know just to to plug on Haas she said at se's conference they say every behind every successful man there is a wom I must say before every successful women group there's a couple of men on stage here just men so um so I put artificial is not real I know it's not just one word but I think there's a there's a stream to that uh on the quantum side I put physics Mar's computer science awesome thanks pant all right and then mashud Ahmad mashud Ahmad embarked on his research journey into the realm of AI and its profound impact on technology project management and business in 2017 over the years he shared his insights on this compelling subjects at

various Global events such as closing keynote at the North Carolina uh PMI conference just this uh August with an impressive career spanning 18 years he runs a Consulting practice and also teaches project management at Grant mchan University currently he serves as an AI adviser to project management software to sorry to uh project management software startup he is also a member of the isaka ethon chapter board shud welcome to the panel thank you nikisha so talking about AI what I put is I'm not worried about AI I'm worried about natural stupidity because AI is artificial intelligence and it has to compete with natural stupidity we have seen in some of the talks how you can have all sort

of security but if you do not make sure your people are aware about the security practice they could become your weakest point and that would be the challenge in future regarding Quantum Computing I just put faster computers as sound to me thank you thanks M all right so now that we've got the introductions out of the way and you know we we have an idea of what we're thinking in terms of these emerging Technologies why don't we get a little bit uh closer to it I don't know if anyone's wondering but I would like a formal definition of really what is AI right there's so much in the media everyone's talking about it you hear

about AI you hear artificial general intelligence you hear artificial you hear generative AI you hear artificial super intelligence so M do you want to just take us there what are we actually talking about when we talk about AI so AI to me the definition is ability for computers to mimic human task or behavior so any computer program that can mimic human behavior that includes pattern recognitions decision making and Analysis that is AI That's a general definition then within that we have machine learning deep learning artificial general intelligence that typically refers to a time when everything will be automated by AI completely right and that could be you know some people and some gurus say that

would be the end of humanity and uh I don't think we'll get there ever I think we will have lots of control that will be put on AI uh for example one of the speaker this morning was talking about he tried to do certain things on chat GPT and now he cannot do it because AI tells him there are some control that you cannot do these type of questions so and then we have generative AI which means an AI that can generate the content so content like written content that we have experienced using chat GPT pictures voice videos any type of generative content that we can generate using AI That's under artificial general intelligence thanks m

p did you want to add anything to that sure um this was very good description of AI but something that I can add about AI is it's like a neural network so it's continuously learning and the one way that I would like to see AI is we are in the very beginning phase of AI reol solution so whatever inputs we are putting in the in the AI Network it has some kind of uh uh response as well it's like you know we are kind of creating a future together so yeah U you know we just how to make sure that we understand ai's capabilities as well as its limitations too thanks Pusa so we're going to get into some of those limit

limitations and some of those capabilities but before we do that why don't we also start with a definition of quantum Computing okay thanks nikisha Quantum Computing well it's Quantum plus Computing right so you know I in fact um I in fact got a a little model here I thought why to how to speak about Quantum Computing from an actual artifact standpoint so what you see here is actually a processor an Intel processor what is quantum Computing out of the day is our future let's deal with it it is coming MLA I don't know how many of you know what m SES right every 18 months your processor's density goes double or your transistor capacity goes

double and at some point of time your transistors which are actually what makes this right the switches zeros and ones the 5 volts and the Zer volts on a processor go to a point where they will be of the dimension of an atom or a proton or a neutron if anybody off here has been a physics student in their life when it comes to that classical physics of Newton doesn't uh subside and it is the quantum mechanics the quantum physics which takes over which behooves uh common sense if you ever go there you know one of the greatest scientists of quantum mechanics said if you have not never if you're not confused by it you

have never understood it so but we are there and we can probably talk later on our panel on what some of the applications are but Quantum Computing is inevitable let's just get on with it let's learn what it is and where we are going with it thank you all right so pan could you tell us how does it differ from classical computing good question yeah so I got a ball here well if I throw a ball and it comes down what is this this is gravity right gravity goes up to down when you throw this ball and it comes down it could come in million different ways or infinite ways those are quantum mechanical paths so in the

world of proton and molecules those quantum mechanical paths are unknown they're all physics they're all mathematics and as long as you observe it that mathematics actually becomes a actual flow so that's the difference between classical computer what we are used to the phones the computers this is the classical computer in our hands but at some point in time it will come to a point where you cannot see how it's being processed but it's being processed behind the scenes and the only way you will actually identify it is by observing it and you figure out oh it's a zero or a one but between in its input and its output it's infinite number of ways how

you can deal with it uh what you see here is actually in the quantum Computing World they call it a block sphere all the points on this sphere are actually points of information you can code on it that's called cubits Quantum bits and right now we just have a one or a zero in classical computers so I'll stop there I mean we can keep talking a lot but the fundamental difference is one or a Zero versus infinite points on a ball which could be the information coded on a cubit you can can process and that's what faster means thank you are you sufficiently confused well he said right he said if we're not confused we don't understand

what we're talking about no so it's good I think I took away from that pant that classical Computing we're talking zeros and ones it's very it's very binary right when we go to cubits in the quantum realm you know it's all over the place yeah that's absolutely correct yeah it's all probabilities it's all mathematics but there is it point where that world meets the world of our actual reality and that's those are the computers we are building right now but you're absolutely right okay so I want to go I want to follow up on on something you said and then we'll we'll also follow up on on it from the AI perspective as well you said Quantum

Computing is here it's inevitable you know we can't deny it and I want to challenge it and say is it really is it really here can we talk about what applications there are currently of quantum computer absolutely Absol absolutely go check it out go Google it quantum cryptography bb84 protocol one of my previous professors in Montreal that so we talk about quantum computers let me be very honest with you it's not just about computers it's about communication also and Quantum communication is a proven field go check out dve go check out magicq Technologies go check out Google go check out uh Microsoft they actually have Quantum simulation go check out IBM they have an IBM ecosystem on quantum Computing with

actual real Quantum Hardware Computing to a certain extent they broke IBM broke the RSA algorithm which we all say is foolproof for classical computers with the prime numbers 5 into three 15 15 broken back into five and three which are prime numbers through what's it called a chars algorithm they actually did that on a carbon molecule and they proved it uh the physics of sending data up to the satellites and down using Quantum Computing in correct R card fraud detection in stock market analysis optimization problems with ships optimization problems with sell sending oil from one point to another in fact I work for Enbridge The Fortune 500 companies actually Enbridge um um optimization problem on the traffic

folks going through the airports the um optimization problem on energy Alberta energy regulator there's a company which in fact did use A's data to forecast Energy prices in Alberta using Quantum Computing algorithms simulating it on Quantum Hardware so it's not something out there it is happening as we speak optimization cyber security credit card fraud detection for for uh stock market analysis as I said ships um and and this is a very big optimization problem so simulation optimization security forecasting fraud detection are actual applications where Quantum algorithms are being used okay so you say Quantum algorithms are being used are we using Quantum uh computers to run those algorithms or are we using classical computers to run those Quantum

algorithms good question so good thank you nikisha so right now I don't quote me exactly IBM experts can probably speak uh to that we have a 100 Cubit quantum computer which has been which has seen the light of the world to answer your question we don't have a mass scale quantum computer run Quantum algorithms so they simulate for the most part Quantum algorithms using python using qar using certain languages on their platforms Azure Google IBM and they use that on right now they're using classical uh Hardware to be honest but they simulate it and Abstract it so that they can still get the actual results of what Quantum algorithms can do all right uh that way

they're able to solve bunch of problems at this point in time yeah one quick one just to add on a plug to that random number generators how many of you us know random number generators are so important in computer science we actually don't have Randomness in our world if it is classical in nature because you can predict from point A to point B what uh what uh what it is in the quantum world it is pure Randomness Google is actually building a Quantum random number generator imagine the possibilities which will come with that thank you thanks pant all right what about on the AI front now I don't think or maybe there are persons in the room

that would actually say we're not very far along any AI but I'm not sure we'll check later right what do you think um mashud how far along are we and um what's the future looking like in terms of so I think with aivr it's here right now all of us have experien and used chat GPT to some extent right um some of us have done some Advanced computation and you know using AI generative AI for our benefit so it is here it is not something that will happen in future it is happening right now and now we have seen all the competition comes in so Google B is Google B is there metal Lama is there

cloudy2 is there and there a bunch of other other AI tools out there and then there are specialized application of machine learning in special Industries for example in healthcare in Radiology that are coming there so AI is real it is here it is something that all of us have experience and will continue to experience and it will only get better thank you all right so I want us to play a little game all right I'm going to pass you these um cards all right and I'm going to make a statement all right and then they're going to show red or green um to indicate whether they agree or disagree with what I'm saying okay and then we'll get into to the why all

right so chat GPT and AI are going to take cyber security jobs oh wow we have consensus all right so bua do you want to start us out on this one you're saying no they're not going to take uh jobs let's talk about why so I think AI will have an impact on all of these actors and the biggest would be one of the biggest would be cyber security because uh we can see say that you know offensive attacks will increase and with that of course we'll need uh uh we'll need defensive uh people on defensive side as well so like mashud also said there will be a big gap in the awareness so I can say that you

know uh there will be a shift in the type of job that we have to do but there will be a lot of demand for cyber security that's so pentesters don't have to worry about pentesters I I cannot say for sure I don't have very much knowledge into pentesting but my thought is uh you know for at least for some years it's like we are in a very beginner beginning stage of AI so um from my past experience we were using some uh tools AI uh some tools like EDR and DLP in our environment but those tools had a uh module for artificial intelligence machine learning they were not that powerful so we need a lot of fine-tuning

maybe uh mhud and Prashant can correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are far away from that uh point where we I don't know we just give it over to the machines yeah all right that's fair well I'm I'm always philosophical before I'm granular or technical to be honest with you so My Philosophy states that there will always be need for humans to uh to to use technology not to be taken over by technology there is always you know technology is your best servant but a bad Master as they call it so it's important for you and AI for me is a technology or a or a solution to solving problems it is not augmenting or

replacing human beings because we are the ones who created them so I'm not of the guys of the skynets or the Terminators who think you know that they will take over us because we'll always have that kill switch which will kill them at some point in time so maybe beyond my days if I die yeah I might take over but at least in my days it'll stay as it is so uh with that said I mean I I'm of the belief that a technology should augment you and your function to do it right and do it efficiently in an optimized fashion so if I a cyber security expert I want to do pen testing as an example what pu

Puja took I want to write an exploit code now I don't have to go through five different websites or whatnot in fact uh Corey gave a talk on on in his last slide he mentioned that you could use chat GPD now to look at your API security vulnerabilities and you know right off the bat because it can scour the internet to give you that instead of going through 500 different API endpoints so you are using a technology to augment you and in my opinion that should always be the case with AI yes you need a check for a human check to make sure that what you got is right and we can go into you know things like

hallucination or harmful bias and whatnot but um yeah that's my opinion I I still don't think that I'll be replaced by a robot sometime in future thank you gotcha so I agree um the technology is it's a tool that we can use to leverage our to give a leverage to ourself meaning it's a tool that if we can start using it today it will help us do our job better quicker and faster whether it's AI it's Computing technology or any of the technology we need to use it the key here is to learn those new technologies and start start using it the other key is we need to remember that whatever technology or AI model that we are using today they will

become irrelevant tomorrow so how many of you in the room Remember map quest okay and we forget about them that was a part of our life you know sometime back before the Google Maps right so we forget things what is important is our ability to unlearn and relearn and I will let this digest because whatever technology we are using today will become irrelevant tomorrow so we tomorrow we need to unlearn it and relearn it new way and that unlearning and relearning cycle will happen much more faster than we have experienced before this is the first generation that we will experience multiple industrial Revolutions in our lifetime so it is very important for us to unlearn and

relearn the new way now talking about whether AI can do pen testing so P some use cases for pen testing yes AI can help us do it better right like prashad mentioned example uh from yesterday's talk that you know you can use chat GPT to look at some of the apis and some of the scripts but there's still need for human to validate whether that was a right use case for the situation so there will always be a need for a human to overlook and give the oversight and provide the human context thank you thanks just a quick one if I may just a very quick point right you always think technology and Robotics would be

optimizing fast and whatnot think for a second human beings just don't have the good side of their life they always have the bad side too they're clever they're disgusting they're frustrating sometimes there are emotions there can you ever imagine technology to be clever cutting corners or uh you know trying to do things where they are unethical in nature um so think about that you know it's not about just the fastness and the optimization side but it's also seeing how can actually mimic a human being in all its aspects of being right and wrong good and bad you know uh beautiful and ugly and not sure if technology could ever do that but that's my point thank you that's the

that's the goal right I think we're like when we talk about generative AI we're not there yet we're dealing with Bots or self driving cars that do one thing very well just one thing human beings are complex like you said right we do many things you know we we touch we we see we like the idea I think we're still very much in the infancy of machines being able to even understand touch and smell we don't even really understand how our nose works right so it's hard for us to replicate that but um there was something that mud said he talked about relearning and unlearning relearning right and I think think that for many of

us in cyber security that is familiar like if you're in cyber you're probably someone that likes to loan right he like likes to to find out about new things so I guess for Puja as a as a student you know what what do you say to someone who is looking to get into uh cyber security in an era where AI is playing such a prominent role and we KN we know that what we're seeing now with chat gbt isn't new right like chat gbt has been around for a long time it was just released to the public last November but it's been there for a while it's it's been in our products for a while and so now that

everything is at the Forefront what's the advice that you would give to persons looking to get into the into cyber security thanks nikisha so yeah I have a lot of thoughts on this uh so you know first thing that I would like to say to all the newcomers in cyber security is have curiosity there's so many things in cyber security so you will always find something that you'll feel passionate about especially right now when so many Technologies are advancing very quickly uh and they are merging together so there's a lot of scope so create some curiosity and then about using generative AI so always understand there are things which generative AI can do for you but but it has a lot of

limitations too uh so just giving an example when I started preparing for a presentation on uh AI risks and control I try to use chat GPD for some of my research but it can never generate the ideas or uh it can never generate the kind of critical thinking uh the ideas that you can have with critical thinking so uh always you you know try to go through like lot of resources it will give you a deep understanding of the subject and now we are in an era where we have a lot of open resources like LinkedIn I really like it a lot these days because I get a lot of free resources whatever subject I want to

check about there is something about there on LinkedIn or some other open resources like YouTube or geub there are so many so learn it and then again we have an amazing Community here in Edmonton and overall globally so collaborate more and more with people so just have curiosity and feed your curiosity that's all I can say thanks Pua now I know that we're close to time and I do want to get the audience involved so we're going to forego some of the questions that we have and just open it up to the audience for a bit are there any questions that you have or comments yep uh do we have do you want I'll come

okay thank you yeah so we've talked a little bit about uh Quantum Computing and AI now if you take this to its logical conclusion and you combine the two um say we would be we would take chat GPT 4 and we would hook it up to a quantum computer we would feed it all the Daya we have we would give this nice uh context so jgpt works with like tokens right and how much context it can digest so now that's pretty low it can like digest 32,000 words I I think at at the most and remember that context and give give answers intelligence to that context but now we have a quantum computer so we can do like a million

tokens context um how what would that look like do you think how would it impact um

things well that's that's very very scary question actually I didn't think about it like Quantum Computing marrying artificial intelligence and and uh you know God is your savior um uh it will be definitely gamechanging I must say right imagine for a second when you marry to big uh Computing like to Big Concepts and and you merge them together um it will be definitely gamechanging now what are those possibilities I mean it's open to your human mind end of the day Quantum Computing can bring you the fastest what you need and chat GPT for that matter as you said you know million tokens or more than that when you're trying to leverage natural language processing to to to

figure it out I mean um I I would love to get that our end product go through a touring test I don't know if you know what a touring test is for those who probably know a touring test is basically go in a blackbox you have a computer and then you have a human being and you start pointing questions to them and they both answer you and you can't figure out whether that's an actual human being or a computer answering you and that probably what Alan Turing said in 1950s I imagined saying that's when I can say it's an actual artificial intelligence May making a real intelligence because you cannot differentiate between the two um I would

love to get that particular product or machine or solution for that matter go through a Turing test and still figure out can that be a real human being or is that still an artificial intelligence but on steroid so that's my quick answer to that I just want to add uh one thing a scenario so we live in Alberta and we understand why there's a need for a pipeline that can take oil from Alberta out right it's critical for us it's not critical for the BC or the us or for some other different uh regions right if you talk if you ask this question to an AI or Quantum Computing it will give you a logical answer answer that makes sense

to it but when it comes to human we have our own bias we have our own decision making we have our own reasons right so somebody may say it's because of the environmental damage other people may say it's a cost or whatever but at the end you will have your logic that is true or false right but the human connectivity and how human perceive things that will still continue to play their role in future thank you thanks M do you have time for one more

I'll pick on pant for a moment because he knew that it was coming um we talk about Quantum Computing from the perspective of the here and now and I think that I think that we're in the age where we will start to see quantum computers from a centralized data center perspective but we don't really have the physical transport to be able to support quantum computers and so when do you think that we might have that physical transport layer to be able to support quantum in the way that many of us in the room may be envisioning which is applying a quantum computer concept to attritional computer or do you think that we'll get there I'm not I'm still not

sure thank you Michelle first of all she is actually uh we know each other quite well for a long time she's one of my best buddies and uh it's always great to have questions coming from her and when various forums to answer your question um it's a very relevant question on what the transport mechanism would be of these cubits we keep talking about uh but I'll I'll encourage you to Google or read uh the phenomenon called quantum teleportation and uh beam MEAP Scotti for those who might have seen Star Wars right you you go into a chamber and you basically get out and you teleport back into some Another Universe or some another place um and that's actually a

reality when you go back and read physics you will see Albert Einstein uh and irin SC scer they were the um U the stalwarts of quantum mechanics they did what's called an epr Paradox the Einstein Podolski Rosen Paradox which basically States in a very simple term you have a particle which goes from point A on the other end of the universe breaks out and goes to the other end of the universe two parts of the particle you change the attribute of its momentum on the other end on end of the universe to be an up its momentum will change down on the next end of the universe because the laws of physics of momentum cannot be falsified in the world of

physics what happened there spooky action the the the speed of light cannot even measure it for millions and billions of Fe for one end to the other end of universe but it actually happens in a laboratory experiment the particles react in near instantaneous manner when you talk on one the other happens that's called quantum teleportation there are experiments around around it and I imagine that would be used in the field of communicating these states out from one point to another in in the world of K computers so it may not be traditional wires it could be literally the spooky action at a distance where you are influencing from one point to another thank you all right I've lost my mind but I

think we have a couple I think we have a couple minutes left and I just wanted to ask each of the panelists if there was one thing that they wanted you to take away from today's session what would that one thing be scared be very scared no yeah so on that yeah keep yourself open just don't be scared be optimistic be informed so you know stay updated I love the way says it right scared but uh um I'd be say be curious you are a kid in a candy shop be curious and the world is open for you so just learn and I'm going to I'm going to repeat what I said earlier is our

ability to unlearn and relearn the new way thank you that's excellent thanks thank you hi m