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

Foundations: Threat Modeling for Agentic AI

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

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates.
• Crafting policies: acceptable use, escalation rules, data handling, and auditability.
• Compliance considerations and gathering evidence for audits.

Non-Human Identity & Authentication for Agents

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

Access Controls, Secrets, and Data Protection

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

Observability, Auditing, and Incident Response

• Designing telemetry for agent behavior: intent tracing, command logs, and provenance.
• SIEM integration, setting alerting thresholds, and ensuring forensic readiness.
• Developing runbooks and playbooks for agent-related incidents and containment.

Red-Teaming Agentic Systems

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

Hardening and Mitigations

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

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Deployment strategies: staging, canary releases, and progressive rollouts for agents.
• Change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks.
• Cross-functional governance: playbooks for security, legal, product, and ops teams.

Capstone: Red-Team / Blue-Team Exercise

• Execute a simulated red-team attack on a sandboxed agent environment.
• Defend, detect, and remediate as the blue team using established controls and telemetry.
• Present findings, a remediation plan, and recommended policy updates.

Summary and Next Steps