AI Can Scour Code To Find Accidentally Public Passwords (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Researchers at software infrastructure firm Pivotal have taught AI to locate this accidentally public sensitive information in a surprising way: By looking at the code as if it were a picture. Since modern artificial intelligence is arguably better than humans at identifying minute differences in images, telling the difference between a password and normal code for a computer is just like recognizing a dog from a cat. The best way to check whether private passwords or sensitive information has been left public today is to use hand-coded rules called "regular expressions." These rules tell a computer to find any string of characters that meets specific criteria, like length and included characters.

Comments

Regular Expressions

[jbwiebe]

Have we really reached the point on a 'News for Nerds' site where we need to explain the term 'regular expression'?