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

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

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

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Policy design covering acceptable use, escalation protocols, data handling standards, and auditability.
• Compliance considerations and strategies for collecting audit evidence.

Non-Human Identity and Authentication for Agents

• Designing agent identities using service accounts, JWTs, and short-lived credentials.
• Applying least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credentialing mechanisms.
• Strategies for identity lifecycle management, rotation, delegation, and revocation.

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

• Fine-grained access control models and capability-based patterns for agent environments.
• Secrets management, encryption in transit and at rest, and data minimization practices.
• Protecting sensitive knowledge sources and PII from unauthorized agent access.

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

• Designing telemetry for agent behavior, including intent tracing, command logging, and provenance tracking.
• SIEM integration, alerting thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for agent-related incident containment and response.

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

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

Hardening and Mitigations

• Engineering controls including response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing.
• Policy and orchestration controls involving approval flows, human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and governance hooks.
• Model and prompt-level defenses such as input validation, canonicalization, and output filtering.

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Deployment patterns for agents, including staging, canary releases, and progressive rollouts.
• Change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks.
• Cross-functional governance playbooks integrating 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