The OpenAI Cybersecurity Grant Program has named Kitchener-Waterloo-based CoGuard, a cybersecurity and artificial intelligence startup.
The grant program will be launched in June 2023 to support cybersecurity projects using AI to defend against cyberattacks as well as quantify the cybersecurity capabilities AI models.
CoGuard used the grant to fund research focusing on using OpenAI API to address software misconfiguration.
OpenAI, according to its website, provides grants in $10,000 USD increments. The fund totals $1 million USD. According to OpenAI, the funding can be in the form of API credits, direct funding or “equivalents”.
OpenAI announced eight recipients of funding last week in a announcement. The program has received more than 600 applications in the last year.
CoGuard was listed alongside Dartmouth College Breuer Lab, Boston University Security Lab, MIT Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and others. OpenAI stated that these eight projects are “a few” of the programs it has supported.
Albert Heinle (CTO and cofounder of CoGuard) claims that the company was accepted into this program in December, and received grant funding in February. Heinle declined the disclose the amount of OpenAI’s grant for the startup.
CoGuard, founded in 2020, says it uses AI for the automated detection of software misconfigurations. These occur when configuration settings are either missing or incorrectly applied in a software or platform, which can allow unauthorized access.
CoGuard’s website says that its software helps businesses identify and remediate vulnerabilities, identify gaps in their security infrastructure and help set up a business or migrate to a more secured application development and infrastructure provisioning.
CoGuard was co-founded by CEO Nadia Mazzarolo, and Heinle. Heinle is a PhD graduate, former sessional lecturer, and expert in computer science, programming, and data management. Prior to co-founding CoGuard, Heinle worked as a senior cloud developer at Richmond, BC-based FLIR Systems, and a software developer at Kitchener-Waterloo-based Sortable, according to his LinkedIn page.
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CoGuard used the grant funding from OpenAI to support a CoGuard research project that focused on using OpenAI’s API to address misconfiguration of software and platforms. The study focused on using the API to identify new policies and rules and improve existing configurations while maintaining or improving the existing configurations.
Heinle, in an email to BetaKit, said that CoGuard was looking at the use of LLMs as a way to manage and update a comprehensive set of infrastructure configuration rules. “When we saw the grant that OpenAI offered for cybersecurity research, it was a great chance to test this idea within a research project. It was a success and we are grateful to OpenAI for their trust and support.
OpenAI, which created the text generator ChatGPT and is now a part of OpenAI, has been criticised for not being sufficiently prepared to handle the safety risks associated AI development.
This year, several safety-focused leaders, employees, and managers left the company, including Ilya Sutskever. launched, a new company that focuses on developing AI superintelligence in a safe manner.
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