This collaborative project between IIT Madras and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) aims to establish a High-Quality Node (HiQN) focusing on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cybersecurity (CS). The project seeks to develop advanced AI-driven cybersecurity solutions, including datasets, prototypes, and AI tools that enhance security by detecting and mitigating various cyber threats. HiQN also aims to build national-level research and development infrastructure, fostering a think-tank to guide future AI and cybersecurity initiatives.

The project investigates AI techniques for physical attack analysis, specifically side-channel and fault attacks, to enhance the security of AI applications and systems. It also aims to apply AI to detect misinformation across various media platforms by using multimodal data analysis and network analysis to assess user trustability and misinformation propagation. A significant focus is on developing adversarially robust AI models to protect against active and passive attacks, including techniques for secure and private machine learning in cybersecurity contexts.

Furthermore, the project establishes a framework to evaluate AI applications’ resilience to physical attacks while ensuring the privacy and security of the machine learning process through cryptographic and adversarial defenses. It also involves researching advanced AI hardware elements, such as beyond-CMOS devices, memristors, and phase change memory, for energy-efficient and secure cybersecurity solutions. 

The expected outcomes include robust frameworks for adversarial AI defenses, real-time attack detection tools, and national-level think tanks that guide research and development activities in the field of AI for cybersecurity.