Enable AI Defenses with F5 BIG-IP

Jay KelleySenior Manager, Product Marketing

Everyone is talking and writing about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s everywhere and anywhere you go. It’s all the buzz.

However, even with all the hype, AI is, at its core, a modern application. And just like any other modern app, it’s prone to vulnerabilities and attacks that modern apps may suffer.

You need to protect AI just like any other modern app

Generative AI (GenAI) needs the same kinds of security and delivery services as other modern apps that serve different use cases. These include everything from authentication and identity management to app and API security and bot protection. A typical GenAI app is a web-based service that processes and responds to inputs. And like any other web service, interaction with users occurs via the Internet.

1. Secure access: Like any other modern app, GenAI and the apps that leverage it require resilient access controls that employ strong, flexible, and dynamic authentication and authorization policies. Those policies must be context- and identity-aware and ensure that users attempting access and interaction with GenAI apps have the authority and permissions to do so. Even stronger, more robust authentication should be applied against the APIs that help communications and data delivery with AI-based apps.
2. Vulnerability mitigation: A typical GenAI app is also as vulnerable to attacks—like injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS), and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—as any other modern web application. The data and apps through which users interface with the AI models are also as vulnerable to attacks as any other app, putting your business security and data privacy at risk. The best way to protect any modern, web-based application, like GenAI and apps that incorporate it, is to deploy a web application firewall (WAF). A WAF can stop injection attacks, halt XSS, and defend against denial-of-service (DoS) and DDoS attacks—particularly those targeting apps—at layer 7 of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model.
3. Encrypted threat protection: For even stronger, more resilient protection from attacks against a modern web app like GenAI and apps leveraging it, you should open and inspect incoming traffic from and outgoing traffic to those apps to ensure there isn’t anything dangerous lurking in the traffic that may infect your network and data. And given that nearly all web traffic today is encrypted—even queries to and responses from GenAI apps and other apps using GenAI—you will need to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt that traffic to ensure threats aren’t ready and waiting to bring your organization down.

F5 delivers the defenses that your generative AI tools need today

F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) delivers secure access control and proxy to manage, optimize, and secure user access to applications and data. BIG-IP APM ensures that only the right user can access the right application that they’re authorized to access. BIG-IP APM enables Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), which establishes a one-on-one relationship between users and an app to which they are permitted access, delivering zero trust application access. This protects against unauthorized users and ensures least privileged access. It also protects your organization against threats or malware moving horizontally from app to app in your portfolio, limiting any malware blast radius.

But, as we know, security is a multi-layered approach. And BIG-IP APM is just one component of a comprehensive security strategy for GenAI and apps deploying it.

F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF robustly defends web applications against many types of threats. Behavioral analysis and dynamic signature-based detection identify and mitigate sophisticated attacks. BIG-IP Advanced WAF defends AI inputs from attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in AI algorithms. It protects against injection attacks that locate, alter, or destroy AI training information. It can stop malicious scripts from being injected into AI-generated responses to spread malware. BIG-IP Advanced WAF can also ensure uptime and availability to GenAI by halting DDoS attacks from overloading AI services while stopping malicious bots from negatively affecting AI traffic.

As a complement to BIG-IP Advanced WAF, F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator can decrypt GenAI queries and responses. It intelligently orchestrates decrypted traffic via context-awareness to appropriate security devices in your security stack, including BIG-IP Advanced WAF, via dynamic service chains that ensure queries and responses are clear of anything potentially harmful without creating latency. BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator ensures that encryption keys, ciphers, and certificates are effectively managed and updated to maintain compliance standards.

When deployed together, BIG-IP APM, BIG-IP Advanced WAF, and BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator deliver a comprehensive security solution for generative AI that quickly adapts to today’s fast-evolving threat landscape.

And, if you’re already an F5 customer, it can be as simple as turning on a license to begin protecting your generative AI and its users from all sorts of gnarly complex threats and attacks that may compromise not only the integrity of your GenAI responses but your entire organization and your corporate reputation.

Find out more about BIG-IP APM, BIG-IP Advanced WAF, and BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator.

Also, read our article explaining how BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator can defend AI and your organization from attacks.

About the Author

Jay KelleySenior Manager, Product Marketing

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