John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare, discusses the evolution of web application firewalls (WAFs) as a model for AI in general. He has championed the integration of machine learning into WAFs, and the challenges of adapting to new and evolving web attacks. His presentation explores the history of spam filtering as an analogy for the potential of machine learning in enhancing WAF effectiveness, while also cautioning against the potential for attackers to use machine learning for evasion: This is the beginning of a new era, the cat-and-mouse game is changing, but it’s far from over.

About the speaker

John Graham-Cumming

CTO at Cloudflare

John Graham-Cumming is CTO of Cloudflare and is a computer programmer and author. He studied mathematics and computation at Oxford and stayed for a doctorate in computer security. As a programmer, he has worked in Silicon Valley and New York, the UK, Germany, France and Portugal. His open source POPFile program won a Jolt Productivity Award in 2004. He is the author of a travel book for scientists published in 2009 called The Geek Atlas and has written articles for The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, New Scientist and other publications.
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