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

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Identifying types of agentic threats, including misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain risks.
• Understanding adversary profiles and attacker capabilities specific to autonomous agents.
• Mapping assets, trust boundaries, and critical control points relevant to agent operations.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

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

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

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

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

• Applying fine-grained access control models and capability-based patterns for agents.
• Managing secrets, encryption in transit and at rest, and enforcing data minimization.
• Securing 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 SIEMs, setting alerting thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for agent-related incidents and containment procedures.

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

• Planning red-team exercises, defining scope, rules of engagement, and safe failover mechanisms.
• Exploring 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 like response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing.
• Establishing policy and orchestration controls, including approval flows, human-in-the-loop processes, and governance hooks.
• Applying model and prompt-level defenses such as input validation, canonicalization, and output filters.

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

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

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