Page 273 - Cyber Defense eMagazine RSAC Special Edition 2025

This awareness is critical as governmental agencies are the largest customers in the defense tech field,
and they cannot acquire compromised software components.

Another recommendation is to prioritize the implementation of cybersecurity, model weights security, and
personnel security controls, which are likely to become the focus of coordinated global standards under
emerging U.S. AI policy directions.

Conclusions

Open-source software often serves as the foundation for proprietary applications, and the defense tech
industry is no exception. With the rising popularity of open-source AI, defense tech engineers are now
leveraging these cutting-edge technologies to shape international security using new tools that remain
relatively underexplored. This introduces unique challenges and risks that need careful attention.

The key policy makers – U.S. state defense agencies like Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency’s (CISA), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and the Office of
Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) are constantly gathering feedback from the industry for the
insights on how to shape emerging open-source and open-source AI policies.

This is a great resource for the defense tech developers’ education that should be prioritized by the
businesses during the development cycle. Applying tools in development that generate the Software Bill
of Materials and tracking the open-source AI’s dependencies’ provenance is a crucial first step for the
defense tech applications' transparency and cyber safety.

About the Author
Yuliia Verhun is a technology & business lawyer from the IT industry. For
over 10 years, Yuliia has been helping international startups with
corporate structuring, operations, board governance, intellectual
property & data protection in the EU, USA, and Middle East. As General
Counsel, Yuliia led investment rounds for tech startups in the UAE and
prepared Unicheck – an EdTech SaaS platform serving over a million
end users for large-scale public procurements in the U.S., and later, for
a high-value M&A. These experiences reinforced her belief that
transparent and secure software architecture is a strategic asset,
consistently scrutinized during due diligence and procurement
processes on the international stage. Yuliia is actively engaged in
research at the intersection of open-source AI and cybersecurity, with a particular focus on applications
in defense technology.

Yuliia Verhun can be reached online at [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuliia-verhun-
general-counsel/ and at my company website: https://generalcounsel.verhun.com/.

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