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

Foundations: Threat Modeling for Agentic AI

• Categorizing agentic threats: misuse, privilege escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.
• Profiling adversaries and assessing attacker capabilities relevant to autonomous agents.
• Identifying assets, trust boundaries, and essential control points for agent operations.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Establishing governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Crafting policies for acceptable use, escalation protocols, data handling, and auditability.
• Addressing compliance requirements and gathering evidence for audit purposes.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

• Creating agent identities using service accounts, JWTs, and ephemeral credentials.
• Applying least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credential issuance.
• Managing the identity lifecycle, including rotation, delegation, and revocation strategies.

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

• Implementing fine-grained access control models and capability-based patterns for agents.
• Managing secrets, ensuring encryption in transit and at rest, and practicing data minimization.
• Safeguarding sensitive knowledge bases and PII from unauthorized agent access.

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

• Designing telemetry for agent behavior, including intent tracing, command logging, and provenance tracking.
• Integrating with SIEMs, setting alert thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for containing and responding to agent-related incidents.

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

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

Hardening and Mitigations

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

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

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

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Conduct a simulated red-team attack against a sandboxed agent environment.
• Act as the blue team to defend, detect, and remediate using established controls and telemetry.
• Present findings, outline a remediation plan, and suggest policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps