An Automatic Sensitive Image Search System with Generative Artificial Intelligence to Identify Data Leaks on Internet

Abstract

With the widespread use of Internet technologies, the protection of personal data to ensure cyber security and privacy compliance has become a major challenge for not only enterprises but also governments. Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems primarily focus on preventing internal data from leaking out. However, there is a lack of effective solutions to proactively detect sensitive images already exposed on the Internet. To address these challenges, we developed an automatic sensitive image search system to identify data leaks on the Internet. Our system utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically search, detect and flag potential privacy-leaking data that contains personal data. We first analyze the sensitive data, such as identification (ID) cards, driver’s licenses, passports, and financial statements, to obtain the standardized document layouts and their personal data elements. Then, our system uses generative AI (GenAI) to generate an example image of user-defined sensitive data. This example image is applied to search target images from the Internet. As there may be lots of target images, we propose AI-driven methods to effectively suppress meaningless matches and then analyze the meaningful images to identify sensitive content. At last, remediation recommendations for cyber security and privacy compliance are then provided by large language models (LLMs). To demonstrate the real value of our system, we have shown some examples of searching data leaks on the Internet. Our system does discover some significant issues.