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

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Categories of agentic threats: misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain risks.
• Adversary profiles and attacker capabilities unique to autonomous agents.
• Identifying assets, trust boundaries, and critical control points for agent operations.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Policy design covering acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling, and auditability.
• Addressing compliance requirements and collecting evidence for audits.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

• Creating identities for agents: utilizing service accounts, JWTs, and short-lived credentials.
• Applying least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credentialing.
• 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 sources and PII from unauthorized agent access.

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

• Designing telemetry for agent behavior, including intent tracing, command logs, and provenance.
• Integrating with SIEM tools, setting alerting thresholds, and preparing for forensics.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for handling agent-related incidents and containment.

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 impact.

Hardening and Mitigations

• Implementing engineering controls: response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing.
• Applying policy and orchestration controls: approval flows, human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and governance hooks.
• Deploying model and prompt-level defenses: input validation, canonicalization, and output filters.

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Adopting deployment patterns: staging, canary, and progressive rollout strategies for agents.
• Enforcing change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deploy safety checks.
• Coordinating cross-functional governance: integrating security, legal, product, and ops playbooks.

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Conducting a simulated red-team attack against a sandboxed agent environment.
• Defending, detecting, and remediating as the blue team by leveraging controls and telemetry.
• Presenting findings, remediation plans, and proposed policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps