The best way to check whether private passwords or sensitive information has been left public today is to use hand-coded rules called “regular expressions.”
But researchers at software infrastructure firm Pivotal have taught AI to locate this accidentally public sensitive information in a surprising way:
By looking at the code as if it were a picture.
They first turned the text of passwords and code into matrixes, or lists of numbers describing each string of characters.
This is the same process used when AI interprets images—similar to how the images reflected into our eyes are turned into electrical signals for the brain, images and text need to be in a simpler form for computers to process.