Lab Research Areas
The goal of the Offensive AI lab is to produce research to help guard against the emergence of offensive AI, the use of artificial intelligence for malicious purposes. This includes attacks on AI systems (adversarial machine learning), and attacks powered by AI (deepfakes, swarm malware, ML for zero-day detection, etc,).
The lab studies how adversaries use AI to enhance their attacks with the mission to identify, counter, and mitigate the threat of offensive AI to help protect society before it enters the mainstream.
Scholar Profile
Yisroel Mirsky joins the faculty of Ben-Gurion University’s Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, marking his return to the university where he conducted his doctoral research.
For his PhD, Dr. Mirsky researched methods for securing computers with machine learning. He also analyzed a new healthcare threat where attackers use deepfake technology to fraudulently alter medical scans. Israeli granting foundations understood the importance of his research, responding with generous fellowships. Several health organizations and the FDA in the US turned to Dr. Mirsky’s publications for guidance. A health information systems company also brought him as a consultant to their offices in Singapore.
Dr. Mirsky’s postdoctoral research on malware and software vulnerability detection, done at Georgia Tech’s prestigious Institute for Information Security & Privacy, has attracted generous grants from the US Department of Defense as well as from Japan, the EU and the UK, the UAE, Singapore, South Korea, and the government of Israel. Dr. Mirsky currently holds seven cybersecurity-related patents, with two others pending.
At Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Mirsky’s lab conducts research on combatting offensive artificial intelligence (AI), focusing specifically on preventing the use of real-time deepfake technology in social engineering attacks, which use psychological manipulation to trick users into revealing sensitive information. This can include calling the elderly using the voices of their children, leading victims to make security mistakes or transfer money in phone scams.
He plans to use Zuckerman funding to support and recruit excellent MSc and PhD students, to encourage them to seek higher education before being drawn into Israel’s high-tech scene, and to provide them with cutting-edge computing facilities. Importantly, their funding allows them to travel and share their research with the international community.
Dr. Mirsky hopes that in this way, his lab can make a significant difference in the world.
