Safe & Secure Agentic AI: Governance, Identity, and Red-Teaming Training Course

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Categorizing agentic threats: misuse, privilege escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.
• Defining adversary profiles and attacker capabilities specifically targeting autonomous agents.
• Mapping assets, defining trust boundaries, and identifying critical control points for agent interactions.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Establishing governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Developing policies for acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling protocols, and auditability.
• Addressing compliance requirements and strategies for evidence collection during audits.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

• Architecting agent identities using service accounts, JWTs, and short-lived credentials.
• Implementing least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credentialing strategies.
• Managing the identity lifecycle, including rotation, delegation, and revocation processes.

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

• Applying fine-grained access control models and capability-based security patterns for agents.
• Managing secrets, enforcing encryption-in-transit and at-rest, and practicing data minimization.
• Safeguarding sensitive knowledge sources and PII from unauthorized access by agents.

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

• Designing telemetry for agent behavior, focusing on intent tracing, command logs, and provenance tracking.
• Integrating with SIEM systems, setting alerting thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for managing agent-related incidents and containment procedures.

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

• Planning red-team exercises by defining scope, rules of engagement, and safe failover mechanisms.
• Applying adversarial techniques such as prompt injection, tool misuse, chain-of-thought manipulation, and API abuse.
• Executing controlled attacks to measure system exposure and assess potential impact.

Hardening and Mitigations

• Implementing engineering controls like response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing.
• Enforcing policy and orchestration controls through approval flows, human-in-the-loop interventions, and governance hooks.
• Deploying model and prompt-level defenses, including input validation, canonicalization, and output filtering.

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Adopting deployment patterns such as staging, canary releases, and progressive rollouts for agents.
• Establishing change control procedures, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks.
• Facilitating cross-functional governance involving security, legal, product, and operations teams.

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Executing a simulated red-team attack against a sandboxed agent environment.
• Acting as the blue team to defend, detect, and remediate using established controls and telemetry.
• Presenting findings, outlining the remediation plan, and recommending policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps