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Overview - AI security posture management

The Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) plan in Microsoft Defender for Cloud secures enterprise-built, multicloud, or hybrid cloud environments. These environments include Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Vertex AI. The Defender CSPM plan secures generative AI applications and AI agents (Preview) throughout their entire lifecycle.

Defender for Cloud reduces risks to cross-cloud AI workloads by:

  • Discovering the generative AI Bill of Materials (AI BOM), which includes application components, data, and AI artifacts from code to cloud.
  • Strengthening generative AI application security posture with built-in recommendations and by exploring and remediating security risks.
  • Using the attack path analysis to identify and remediate risks.

Diagram of the development lifecycle that is covered by Defender for Cloud's AI security posture management.

Important

To enable AI security posture management capabilities on an AWS account that already:

  • Is connected to your Azure account.
  • Has Defender CSPM enabled.
  • Has permissions type set as Least privilege access.

You must reconfigure the permissions on that connector to enable the relevant permissions by using these steps:

  1. In the Azure portal, go to the Environment Settings page and select the appropriate AWS connector.
  2. Select Configure access.
  3. Ensure the permissions type is set to Least privilege access.
  4. Follow steps 5 - 8 to finish the configuration.

Discover generative AI apps

Defender for Cloud discovers AI workloads and identifies details of your organization's AI BOM. This visibility allows you to identify and address vulnerabilities and protect generative AI applications from potential threats.

Defender for Cloud automatically and continuously discovers deployed AI workloads across the following services:

  • Azure OpenAI Service
  • Azure AI foundry
  • Azure Machine Learning
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Google Vertex AI

Defender for Cloud can also discover vulnerabilities within generative AI library dependencies such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Langchain by scanning source code for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) misconfigurations and container images for vulnerabilities. Regularly updating or patching the libraries can prevent exploits, protecting generative AI applications and maintaining their integrity.

With these features, Defender for Cloud provides full visibility of AI workloads from code to cloud.

Discover AI agents (Preview)

Defender for Cloud discovers AI agent workloads and identifies details of your organization's AI BOM. This visibility allows you to identify and address vulnerabilities and protect generative AI agent applications from potential threats.

Note

To view preview features in the Defender portal, you need to enable Microsoft Defender for Cloud preview features in the Defender portal..

Screenshot that shows Defender for Cloud's preview features set to enabled in the Defender portal.

Defender for Cloud automatically and continuously discovers deployed AI agents across the following services:

When you enable the Defender CSPM plan on your Azure subscription, the portal automatically discovers and inventories AI agents deployed with Azure AI Foundry and populates the AI inventory with the list of discovered AI agents.

Learn how to Protect your AI agents (Preview).

Reduce risks to generative AI apps

Defender CSPM provides contextual insights into your organization's AI security posture. You can reduce risks within your AI workloads by using security recommendations and attack path analysis.

Explore risks by using recommendations

Defender for Cloud assesses AI workloads. It issues recommendations on identity, data security, and internet exposure to help you identify and prioritize critical security issues.

Detect IaC misconfigurations

DevOps security detects IaC misconfigurations, which can expose generative AI applications to security vulnerabilities, such as overexposed access controls or inadvertent publicly exposed services. These misconfigurations could lead to data breaches, unauthorized access, and compliance issues, especially when handling strict data privacy regulations.

Defender for Cloud assesses your generative AI apps configuration and provides security recommendations to improve your AI security posture.

To prevent complex problems later, remediate detected misconfigurations early in the development cycle.

Current IaC AI security checks include:

  • Use Azure AI Service Private Endpoints
  • Restrict Azure AI Service Endpoints
  • Use Managed Identity for Azure AI Service Accounts
  • Use identity-based authentication for Azure AI Service Accounts

Explore risks with attack path analysis

Attack path analysis detects and mitigates risks to AI workloads. Data might be exposed during the grounding of AI models to specific data and the fine-tuning of a pretrained model on a specific dataset to improve its performance on a related task.

By continuously monitoring AI workloads, attack path analysis can identify weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities and follow up with recommendations. Additionally, it extends to cases where the data and compute resources are distributed across Azure, AWS, and GCP.