TALK: Beyond Autonomous Cyber: From Autonomous Silos to Mission Assurance at Machine Speed
Hahna Kane Latonick
ABSTRACT
Cybersecurity is rapidly moving toward autonomy at machine speed across increasingly complex and dynamic operational environments. AI is writing and securing code, generating attacks, detecting threats, recommending remediation, validating controls, and automating compliance. Yet these capabilities are largely being developed and deployed in isolation. We are making every part of the system autonomous without making the system itself autonomous.
This session presents a practical architecture for moving beyond autonomous cyber silos toward Autonomous Mission Assurance: a continuously operating, human-governed ecosystem connecting secure software development, offensive and defensive cyber operations, test and evaluation, verification and validation, deployment, compliance, remediation, and continuous monitoring.
We will explore how shared context, evidence, orchestration, and feedback loops can enable autonomous capabilities to collaborate rather than operate as disconnected point solutions. The session introduces concepts including an assurance fabric, continuous adversarial validation, machine-generated evidence, risk-informed decision support, and bounded autonomy, where machines operate independently within explicit human-defined policy and risk constraints.
Rather than removing humans from cybersecurity, this approach changes their role from executing every activity to governing intent, risk, and authority. The result is a closed-loop model where systems continuously observe, reason, act, verify, learn, and adapt to deliver mission assurance at machine speed.
Hahna Kane Latonick
For the past 19 years of her engineering career, Hahna Kane Latonick has worked throughout the defense industry specializing in cybersecurity as a computer security researcher for the Department of Defense and several defense contracting companies. She has been featured as a cybersecurity subject matter expert on Fox Business News, ABC, U.S. News and World Report, and other national media outlets. She currently serves as a Director of R&D for a cybersecurity firm and has led four tech startups related to computer security, serving as CTO of two of them, VP of R&D, and Director of R&D. She has trained and developed security researchers at one of the top five aerospace and defense industry companies. She has also taught at Black Hat, DEF CON, CanSecWest, Ringzer0, and BSides. She’s had top place finishes at DEF CON CTFs: second place for the 2025 Embedded Systems Village CTF, third place for the 2024 RF CTF and tying first place at the 2023 IoT CTF. She also placed 6th in the DEF CON CTF finals, ranking in the top 1.5% of ethical hackers worldwide. She also holds security certifications, including CISSP, CEH, and Certified Android Exploit Developer. Latonick attended Swarthmore College and Drexel University where she earned her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Engineering along with a Mathematics minor.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hahnakane
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hahnakane/
