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Artificial intelligence has notorious problems with accuracy — so maybe it’s not surprising that using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too.
As a security firm called Apiiro found in new research, developers who used AI produce ten times more security problems than their counterparts who don’t use the technology.
Looking at code from thousands of developers and tens of thousand repositories, Apiiro found that AI-assisted devs were indeed producing three or four times more code — and as the firm’s product manager Itay Nussbaum suggested, that breakneck pace seems to be causing the security gaps.
“AI is multiplying not one kind of vulnerability,” Nussbaum wrote, “but all of them at once.”
Ironically, some of the “benefits” of AI coding appear to be the vehicles for these issues. Apiiro found that syntax errors fell 76 percent and logic bugs — faulty code that causes a program to operate incorrectly — were down 60 percent.
The tradeoff has, however, been severe: privilege escalation, or code that allows an attacker to get higher access to a system than they should, increased by a staggering 322 percent. Architectural design problems, meanwhile, were up 153 percent.
“In other words,” Nussbaum wrote, “AI is fixing the typos but creating the timebombs.”
It’s not exactly a huge surprise that AI coding produces security risks. As flagged by The Register, researchers from the University of San Francisco, Canada’s Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and University of Massachusetts Boston found in a recent but not-yet-peer-reviewed study that AI coding “improvements” end up majorly degrading security overall.
Still, this new data shows just how massive the problem is. With companies like Coinbase, Shopify, and Duolingo now mandating AI use for their workers, this issue is not only creating way more security vulnerabilities, but also creating more work for those tasked with fixing the issues.
It’s pretty clear that AI’s biggest “transformation” in the workplace so far has been in creating more fixes for remaining human workers to sift through. Still, the integration of AI into coding — and writing, and audio, and video — does not appear to be slowing down, which means that the problem will get much worse before it gets better.
More on AI coding: AI-Powered Coding Assistant Deletes Company Database, Says Restoring It Is Impossible
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