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

Fundamentals: Threat Models for Agentic AI

• Categorizing agentic threats: misuse, escalation, data leakage, and supply-chain vulnerabilities
• Profiling adversaries and defining attacker capabilities specific to autonomous agents
• Identifying assets, trust boundaries, and critical control points for agent interactions

Governance, Policy, and Risk Management

• Establishing governance frameworks for agentic systems, including roles, responsibilities, and approval gates
• Developing policies for acceptable use, escalation protocols, data handling, and auditability
• Addressing compliance requirements and gathering evidence for audits

Non-Human Identity and Authentication for Agents

• Architecting agent identities using service accounts, JWTs, and short-lived credentials
• Implementing least-privilege access patterns and just-in-time credentialing
• Managing identity lifecycle, 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, 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 systems, setting alerting thresholds, and ensuring 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
• Employing adversarial techniques such as prompt injection, tool misuse, chain-of-thought manipulation, and API abuse
• Conducting controlled attacks to measure exposure and impact

Hardening and Mitigations

• Implementing engineering controls: response throttles, capability gating, and sandboxing
• Applying policy and orchestration controls: approval flows, human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and governance hooks
• Utilizing model and prompt-level defenses: input validation, canonicalization, and output filters

Operationalizing Safe Agent Deployments

• Adopting deployment patterns: staging, canary releases, and progressive rollouts for agents
• Managing change control, testing pipelines, and pre-deployment safety checks
• Facilitating cross-functional governance through security, legal, product, and ops playbooks

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, remediation plans, and recommended policy updates

Summary and Next Steps