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

Foundations: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Categorizing agentic threats, including misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain risks.
• Profiling adversaries and understanding attacker capabilities specifically targeting autonomous agents.
• Mapping critical assets, trust boundaries, and key control points within agent architectures.

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Establishing governance frameworks for agentic systems, defining roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Crafting policies that address acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling, and auditability.
• Addressing compliance requirements and strategies for collecting audit evidence.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

• Structuring 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

• 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

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

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

• Planning red-team exercises, defining scope, rules of engagement, and safe failover procedures.
• Utilizing adversarial techniques such as prompt injection, tool misuse, chain-of-thought manipulation, and API abuse.
• Executing controlled attacks to measure potential 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 checks, and governance hooks.
• Deploying 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 rollout for agents.
• Enforcing change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deploy safety checks.
• Coordinating cross-functional governance among security, legal, product, and ops teams.

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Executing a simulated red-team attack against a sandboxed agent environment.
• Acting as the blue team to defend, detect, and remediate using established controls and telemetry.
• Presenting findings, a detailed remediation plan, and necessary policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps