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

Foundations: Threat Modeling for Agentic AI

• Categories of agentic threats, including misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain risks
• Analysis of adversary profiles and attacker capabilities relevant to autonomous agents
• Identifying assets, trust boundaries, and critical control points within agent architectures

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Governance frameworks for agentic systems, covering roles, responsibilities, and approval gates
• Policy design focusing on acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling, and auditability
• Compliance requirements and strategies for collecting evidence for audits

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

• Architecting agent identities using service accounts, JWTs, and short-lived credentials
• Applying least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credentialing
• Managing identity lifecycles, 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 solutions, defining alerting thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness
• Developing 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
• 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 like response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing
• Establishing policy and orchestration controls, including approval flows, human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and governance hooks
• Applying model and prompt-level defenses such as input validation, canonicalization, and output filters

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Utilizing deployment patterns such as staging, canary releases, and progressive rollouts for agents
• Managing change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks
• Fostering cross-functional governance through playbooks involving security, legal, product, and ops teams

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

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

Summary and Next Steps