National Lab Makes Science and AI-Enabled Cybersecurity Move Faster
National Lab Makes Science and AI-Enabled Cybersecurity Move Faster
Publish Date: 2026-06-01 08:00:00
Source Domain: www.afcea.org
Vithala praised the PNNL team, saying that working with them provided access to world-class research and development and allowed the company to build upon foundational science that would take years to develop independently. “The PNNL team provides deep domain expertise that ensures our threat intelligence knowledge substrate is robust,” he said. He added that the PNNL team helped his company navigate the rigorous federal licensing process.
Halappanavar reported that others within PNNL use the technology for government-sponsored work, and that, along with PNNL and the Department of Energy, the Defense Department has provided some funding for the research.
He outlined planned improvements from both research and operations perspectives, including tackling that missing information problem he mentioned earlier in the interview. “We are also developing tools where we can embed it in a different space and ask these questions that can still find you answers when there is missing information.”
It works by embedding entities, such as vulnerabilities and weaknesses, as well as relationships. “We can say that this attack mechanism exploits a given vulnerability. So, the exploit is the relationship, and the attack mechanism and vulnerabilities will be the entities. We take all of this information and embed it in some space where we can still ask the same question, and even though we did not have information, you can still extract good information back.”
That is for the research. For the non-research perspective, the goal is to continue integrating MERU into PNNL’s cyber operations. “The next main thing is to actually deploy it in production and have it being used on a regular basis,” Halappanavar offered.
Additionally, the PNNL team has developed a graph retrieval augmented interface, often referred to as a graph RAG, which allows more conversational questions. “You can ask questions in simple conversational style, English or a high-level language,…
