AI Red Teaming Guide for Beginners in 2025

Practical DevSecOps

This episode delves into the critical field of AI Red Teaming, a structured, adversarial process designed to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in AI systems before malicious actors can exploit them.

The Certified AI Security Professional (CAISP) course is specifically designed to advance careers in this field, offering practical skills in executing attacks using MITRE ATLAS and OWASP Top 10, implementing enterprise AI security, threat modelling with STRIDE, and protecting AI development pipelines. This certification is industry-recognized and boosts an AI security career, with roles like AI Security Consultant and Red Team Lead offering high salary potential.

It's an essential step in building safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems, preventing issues like data leakage, unfair results, and system takeovers.

AI Red Teaming involves human experts and automated tools to simulate attacks. Red teamers craft special inputs like prompt injections to bypass safety controls, generate adversarial examples to confuse AI, and analyse model behaviour for consistency and safety. Common attack vectors include jailbreaking to bypass ethical guardrails, data poisoning to introduce toxic data, and model inversion to learn training data, threatening privacy and confidentiality.

The importance of AI Red Teaming is highlighted through real-world examples: discovering unfair hiring programs using zip codes, manipulating healthcare AI systems to report incorrect cancer tests, and tricking autonomous vehicles by subtly altering sensor readings. It also plays a vital role in securing financial fraud detection systems, content moderation, and voice assistants/LLMs. Organisations also use it for regulatory compliance testing, adhering to standards like GDPR and the EU AI Act.

Several tools and frameworks support AI Red Teaming. Mindgard, Garak, HiddenLayer, PyRIT, and Microsoft Counterfit are prominent tools. Open-source libraries like Adversarial Robustness Toolbox (ART), CleverHans, and TextAttack are also crucial.

Key frameworks include the MITRE ATLAS Framework for mapping adversarial tactics and the OWASP ML Security Top 10, which outlines critical AI vulnerabilities like prompt injection and model theft.

Ethical considerations are paramount, emphasising responsible disclosure, legal compliance (e.g., GDPR), harm minimisation, and thorough documentation to ensure transparency and accountability.

For professionals, upskilling in AI Red Teaming is crucial as AI expands attack surfaces that traditional penetration testing cannot address. Essential skills include Python programming, machine learning knowledge, threat modelling, and adversarial thinking.