On 12 March, the Dublin Chapter and UCD’s School of Computer Science in collaboration with UCD’s Advance Centre hosted an event on Cybersecurity and AI in Software Development at the UCD Club. We had a full house with 77 attendees from the cybersecurity sector, and from over 35 organisations across industry and academia.
UCD’s Head of School of Computer Science Dr Neil Hurley welcomed everyone to the UCD Club and referred to their key programs; the Masters in Cybersecurity and the new Masters in Advanced AI. The school boasts world-leading academics and currently has over 100 researchers. Recruitment is open for both programs.
Kate O’Loughlin, Co-Lead of Cyber Ireland’s Dublin Chapter and Director, Information Security Engineering at Mastercard, emphasised the importance of industry and academics working together and introduced the first speaker. Dr Liliana Pasquale, Programme Director, MSC in Cybersecurity, UCD, provided an overview of the challenges and opportunities of using Al in building secure software and spoke about her research in secure software engineering.
An industry perspective was provided by Fergus Harney, Principal Information Security Engineer at MasterCard in which he spoke about integrating Al security into MasterCard’s software development life cycle, particularly through code assistance tools. The evolving nature of Al in software development and the need for ongoing threat modeling and governance was highlighted.
Following the keynotes, a lively panel discussion was moderated by Dr Louise O’Hagan, Co-Chair of Cyber Ireland’s Dublin Chapter and also Cybersecurity Governance Program Manager at Workday. The panel was made up of the following Industry and academic experts:
- Ray Genoe | Director, UCD Centre for Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Investigation,
- Adam Darcy, Lead Senior Software Engineer, Global Deployments & Adoption, Workday,
- Fabio Cerullo, Managing Director, Cycubix,
- Dr Madhusanka Liyanage, Director, Network Softwarization and Security Labs (NetsLab), UCD
The discussion focused on Al security challenges, emphasising issues like supply chain vulnerabilities, data poisoning, and the risks of Al models trained on insecure code.
Key Takeaways:
- AI is already in your organisation—whether you realise it or not. Don’t underestimate its presence or impact. Understanding how AI is being used across your teams is crucial for maintaining security.
- Educate your teams on the tools available and conduct regular code reviews. Ensuring employees know what AI-powered tools they are using and implementing consistent oversight can help prevent vulnerabilities.
- The smarter AI becomes, the more sophisticated and creative cyber threats will be. As AI continues to evolve, so do attack strategies.
- Security is no longer optional, it cannot be an after-thought.
Following the panel discussion, attendees got the opportunity to discuss some of the earlier talking points directly with the panellists and networked with the other attendees.
A poster display allowed researchers from 4 Researcher Centres (Data, Networks, &Security (DNS) Research Labs, UCD Centre for Cybersecurity & Cybercrime Investigation (CCI), LERO and NetsLabs) to showcase their research projects and attendees got to learn more about the projects. Two demonstrations from NetsLab were available for viewing.