Cisco is working on an AI solution that looks at firewall rules and suggests improvements or adjustments.

During a Cisco Live event in Australia, Cisco security manager Jeetu Patel predicts that AI will transform the security landscape. He’s kicking down an open door, but he’s continuing his story, which continues at The Register.

“I expect that all end users will eventually pay for the privilege of having a binary brain box at their side when they go into battle.” He emphasizes that attackers only have to get it right once. “Defenders always have to be right. That’s why security teams focus on defense And Answer.”

As cyberattack analysis advances, AI will give defenders tools that can predict attacker behavior. “We move from defending and reacting to predicting.” Automated responses can then deter the attack.

AI must connect everything

In his presentation he states that providers of point solutions will have a difficult time in the long term. “Such providers evolved because users were unable to purchase or use security systems that provide visibility into all sources of risk,” says Patel. “In this way, they faced the more difficult task of managing multiple, overlapping tools.”

AI can take on this role by processing notifications from various products. Predictions from such a system will not be easy.

Cisco expects the platform to be large enough to train such a system, but expects that since they are large enough, hardly a handful will be able to do something like this. For example, Patel primarily looks at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

Computing power costs money

In a first attempt to build such AI, Cisco is demonstrating an AI assistant for firewall rules. It evaluates rules and allows administrators to identify policies that can be changed or removed using a natural language interface.

Cisco previously integrated AI to find traces of malware activity in encrypted traffic. Today, this tool is available in version 7.4.1 of the Cisco Secure Firewall series.

Finally, Patel emphasizes that such AI services will not remain free in the future. “The operation involves costs Computing Services for generative AI. The suite will include a basic package, but we need to make money beyond that.” Cisco has not yet announced prices for this. “We’re still learning today, later we’ll have a better idea of ​​what the right cost is.”