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

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Categorizing agentic threats: misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain risks.
• Understanding adversary profiles and attacker capabilities tailored to autonomous agents.
• Mapping key assets, trust boundaries, and critical control points specific to agent operations.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Implementing governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Crafting policies for acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling, and auditability.
• Addressing compliance considerations and collecting evidence for rigorous audits.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

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

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

• Establishing fine-grained access control models and capability-based patterns for agents.
• Managing secrets with encryption-in-transit and at-rest, alongside data minimization practices.
• Safeguarding sensitive knowledge sources and PII from unauthorized agent access.

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

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

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

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

Hardening and Mitigations

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

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Adopting deployment patterns such as staging, canary, and progressive rollout for agents.
• Enforcing change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks.
• Coordinating cross-functional governance across security, legal, product, and operations teams.

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Executing a simulated red-team attack against a sandboxed agent environment.
• Defending, detecting, and remediating as the blue team using established controls and telemetry.
• Presenting findings, remediation plans, and necessary policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps