Innovative AI - Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on businesses.
Exploring the Synergy of AI and Blockchain for smart contract auditing
This week in Innovative AI
Innovative AI Shorts:
MIT Innovates: Guarding Against AI Image Fakes with Cutting-Edge DeepCD Tool!
Revolution in Democracy: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Politics!
Elevate Your Business: The Power of Comprehensive Data Visibility
Executives’ Highlight: Explo
ring the Potential of AI in Smart Contract Auditing
Prompts for your Organization: ChatGPT to identify KPIs; ChatGPT to generate leads
Overview: Center for Deep Tech Innovation Events
Tools to try out: Zigzag
Innovative AI Shorts
MIT Innovates: Guarding Against AI Image Fakes with Cutting-Edge DeepCD Tool
MIT researchers are addressing the issue of image manipulation with a newly developed AI tool. The tool, a neural network named DeepCD, can discern between authentic and manipulated images, even those altered by AI itself. As image manipulation becomes more sophisticated and widespread, this tool offers a robust defense, preventing picture fraud across various platforms like social media and journalistic outlets. This also extends to legal investigations where accurate imaging can be crucial. By identifying manipulated visuals, DeepCD could significantly contribute to the fight against the spreading of false information in the digital era, marking a major stride in the battle against "deepfake" technology.
Revolution in Democracy: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Politics
In an unprecedented move globally, artificial intelligence (AI) has started to play a significant role in political decisions and democratic processes, says a recent report by The Guardian. The integration of AI into politics is expected to revolutionize democratic procedures, enhance decision-making efficiency, and promote wider citizen involvement. However, alongside these potential benefits, the increasing reliance on AI also introduces concerns over transparency, security, and ethical application of technology in shaping our societal values. In this new era, understanding the role of AI in politics and its potential impacts are imperative for ensuring the continued health of our democracy.
Elevate Your Business: The Power of Comprehensive Data Visibility
In today's data-driven climate, businesses need to prioritize end-to-end data visibility in their strategies. Companies that have a full picture of their data can use it to drive decisions, improve customer experiences, enhance operational efficacy, and ultimately heighten profitability. End-to-end visibility also plays a crucial role in strengthening data security as it enables organizations to track unusual activities and promptly rectify potential issues. Therefore, for companies striving for growth and improved security, optimizing data visibility is not just a choice but a necessity.
Exploring the Potential of AI in Smart Contract Auditing
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology has led to an increasing number of blockchain projects exploring the incorporation of AI into the blockchain ecosystem, popularly known as "AI-Coins".
Notable examples include SingularityNET, which seeks to democratize AI by establishing an open and decentralized marketplace for AI services, and Fetch.ai, which aims to create a decentralized machine-learning network powered by autonomous agents. These projects represent the growing interest in exploring AI's possibilities within the blockchain space.
However, as it is normal for the early stage of new technology integration, most projects are not convincing or fully mature. Many of them are scams, while others lack the necessary refinement or clarity in their use cases. However, there are also other possibilities for how AI can be integrated into the blockchain landscape. One is the integration of AI into smart contract auditing.
Auditing Smart Contracts in the blockchain, particularly in the Decentralized DeFi Sector
Smart contracts are programmable and self-executing agreements that leverage the power of blockchain technology to automate and enforce predefined conditions (without the need for intermediaries). They are essentially lines of code that reside on a blockchain and execute automatically when specific conditions, defined in the smart contract, are met.
For the decentralized financial (DeFi) sector, where substantial transaction volume and market capitalization are managed through smart contracts, ensuring their security, reliability, and compliance is crucial. The rise of DeFi has made it a prime target for exploitative attacks, exposing potential vulnerabilities and risks associated with smart contracts. To address these challenges and enhance the overall security and trustworthiness of the ecosystem, rigorous auditing of smart contracts is essential. Because, despite the decentralized nature of blockchain technology aiming to eliminate intermediaries, it does not eradicate all potential threats. Errors or vulnerabilities in smart contract code can lead to exploits, resulting in the loss of funds or manipulation of contract outcomes.
Exploits come in various forms, ranging from deceiving users (e.g., encouraging them to hand over their private keys) to exploiting vulnerabilities in smart contracts, thereby gaining unauthorized access to funds such as liquidity pools of a DeFi protocol. To counter these risks, comprehensive auditing (especially of a project's smart contracts) is essential. Auditors thereby perform, inter alia, in-depth security assessments analyzing the smart contract's code base to identify vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors, including so-called reentrancy exploits, arithmetic overflows, access control issues, and many more. By proactively identifying and mitigating these vulnerabilities through audits, the likelihood of successful attacks can be reduced significantly.
Traditional auditing is being done manually. Despite being done by industry experts manual audits, as within all other sectors also, have limitations, including human oversight, time constraints, and the potential for human error.
To address these challenges, researchers and developers are exploring how AI can enhance the smart contract auditing process. The integration of AI technologies can offer significant advantages, such as faster and more comprehensive analysis, improved detection of complex vulnerabilities, and continuous monitoring of smart contracts to ensure ongoing security.
The Advantages of AI in Smart Contract Auditing
AI can leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze vast amounts of smart contract code, identify patterns, and learn from historical data on vulnerabilities. This enables AI systems to develop a deeper understanding of potential risks and emerging threats, making them better equipped to detect sophisticated attacks and hidden exploits that might escape human auditors.
Moreover, AI-driven smart contract auditing can enable real-time monitoring and risk assessment, promptly identifying anomalous behavior or potential vulnerabilities as soon as they emerge. This proactive approach allows for timely responses and mitigates risks before they escalate into significant issues, at least in theory.
Testing AI's Potential in Auditing Smart Contracts
Several experiments have been conducted to explore the potential of AI in auditing smart contracts. One notable example is OpenZeppelin's use of OpenAI's GPT-4 model to identify security issues in Solidity smart contracts. The AI successfully identified vulnerabilities in 20 out of 28 challenges. However, there were instances where the AI failed to identify a vulnerability or even invented a vulnerability that did not exist, highlighting the current limitations of this technology.
Coinbase also conducted experiments using ChatGPT to review token security. While the AI was able to mirror manual reviews for a significant portion of smart contracts, it encountered challenges in providing results for some contracts. Additionally, there were a few instances where ChatGPT mislabeled high-risk assets as low-risk ones.
Another experiment by Coinbase involved the review of 20 smart contracts with the help of ChatGPT. The AI tool matched the results of the manual review in 12 instances but missed the mark on the remaining eight. Among those, five high-risk assets were mistakenly labeled as low-risk. The experiment revealed that ChatGPT has critical limitations, generating inconsistent results in some cases, with outputs varying from one iteration to the next.
AI as a Complementary Tool for Smart Contract Auditing
Despite the limitations observed in these experiments, AI tools like ChatGPT still have the potential to be powerful complementary tools for quality assurance checks in the future. They can aid human auditors in identifying common and well-known vulnerabilities. However, it is evident that AI cannot yet replace human auditors entirely due to the inconsistency of their results.
For the time being, traditional security audit tools remain superior to AI tools in locating vulnerabilities. Still, we believe that as technology continues to advance, it is crucial to recognize the collaborative role of human expertise and ever-improving AI solutions in ensuring the security of smart contracts.
Prompts for your Organization
ChatGPT to identify KPIs
“What are the most important KPIs for the construction industry.”
ChatGPT to generate leads
“Provide me with 10 creative ways to generate leads?”
Overview: Center for Deep Tech Innovation Events
As some of our readers might know, we offer a series of webinars on the topic of AI (and other technologies in the near future).
Below you find a list of upcoming webinars:
Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 4:00 p.m. (CET) - Prompt Engineering for Business Transformation: A Workshop
Wednesday, September 6, 2023, 4:00 p.m. (CET) - Prompt Engineering for Business Transformation: A Workshop
Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 4:00 p.m. (CET) - Prompt Engineering for Business Transformation: A Workshop
more to come!
For more content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel and LinkedIn
Try it out: Zigzag
Zig is an AI-powered platform designed to assist entrepreneurs, freelancers, and corporate innovators in validating and developing their startup ideas. The platform combines human creativity and AI precision to provide features such as fast validation through rapid experiments like landing pages and customer interviews, connections with mentors, investors, and service providers, and assistance in crafting a compelling narrative from vision to pitch deck.
Zig offers different pricing plans, including a free "Hustler" plan with basic features and upcoming "Founder" and "Enterprise" plans with more advanced features and services.
ChatGPT to identify KPIs
ChatGPT to generate leads
