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Is It Illegal to Trick a Robot? (ssrn.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Can you get into trouble under anti-hacking laws for tricking machine learning...? A new paper by security researchers and legal experts asks whether fooling a driverless car into seeing a stop sign as a speed sign, for instance, is the same as hacking into it.
The original submission asks another question -- "Do you have inadequate security if your product is too easy to trick?" But the paper explores the possibility of bad actors who deliberately build a secret blind spot into a learning system, or reconstruct all the private data that was used for training. One of the paper's authors even coded DNA that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of its underlying computer, and the researchers ultimately warn about the dangers of "missing or skewed security incentives" in the status quo.
"Our aim is to introduce the law and policy community within and beyond academia to the ways adversarial machine learning alter the nature of [cracking] and with it the cybersecurity landscape."
The original submission asks another question -- "Do you have inadequate security if your product is too easy to trick?" But the paper explores the possibility of bad actors who deliberately build a secret blind spot into a learning system, or reconstruct all the private data that was used for training. One of the paper's authors even coded DNA that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of its underlying computer, and the researchers ultimately warn about the dangers of "missing or skewed security incentives" in the status quo.
"Our aim is to introduce the law and policy community within and beyond academia to the ways adversarial machine learning alter the nature of [cracking] and with it the cybersecurity landscape."
Modifying a stop sign with the purpose of fooling a self-driving car is similar to someone tampering with a stop sign to fool human drivers, and can be handled with existing laws.
The answer is probably going to depend upon one word:
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC 1030):
(a) Whoever--
(5)
(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
Can you convince judges that "cause the transmission" should only mean active electronic transmission, or can prosecutors convince judges that "cause the transmission" should have the same epidemiological sense as causing the transmission of a virus, worm, etc, regardless of means.
Is cutting the brake lines on a car a security issue? Of course not. But it is a crime.
Exactly. Just saw this article on advertisers and behavior control. It cited how people respond to the smell of disinfectant by keeping a room cleaner, cited it as a sort of mental weakness. Of course non-sociopathic people, on smelling disinfectant, will take it as a sign someone really wants the room clean, and thus keep it clean as a courtesy and possible medical safety thing...But advertisers see this sort of thing as a behavioral switch, and would feel free to place disinfectant smells in a businesses just to get that behavior. The whole mode of thinking behind advertising is the kind of manipulation that could lead AI astray.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.