ai-redteam

AI Red Team

When to Use

• Red-teaming chatbots, agents, RAG systems, or copilots before launch
• Designing safety evaluation suites and adversarial test harnesses
• Reproducing reported prompt injection or jailbreak vulnerabilities
• Validating mitigations after incidents (retesting filters, hardening)
• Running multi-turn coercion, encoding, or indirect injection campaigns
• Assessing bias, harmful output, or data exfiltration risks in LLM applications
• Scoping rules of engagement and severity rubrics for AI security testing

When NOT to Use

• Writing corporate AI policy or risk governance frameworks → ai-risk-governance
• Building production LLM features or RAG pipelines → ai-engineer
• General network/AD/infra penetration testing → network-pentester
• Authorized web/API OWASP testing (non-LLM) → web-pentester
• Enterprise adversary simulation, MITRE ATT&CK campaigns, purple team → red-team-specialist
• Binary, firmware, or protocol reverse engineering → reverse-engineer
• CI/CD pipeline security → devsecops

Related skills

Need	Skill
Production architecture and mitigations	ai-engineer
Governance sign-off and risk tiers	ai-risk-governance
Prompt design baselines	prompt-engineer
CI pipeline security	devsecops
Web/API OWASP pentest (non-LLM)	web-pentester
Network/AD/infra pentest (non-LLM)	network-pentester
Multi-domain pentest (non-LLM)	penetration-tester
Enterprise red team / adversary simulation (non-LLM)	red-team-specialist
Security program and pentest governance	cybersecurity
Deploy/monitor safeguard inference path	ml-infrastructure-engineer-safeguards
Safety benchmarks and classifier training	ml-research-engineer-safeguards
Post-incident disk/memory/log forensics and chain of custody	digital-forensics-analyst
Binary/protocol RE on non-LLM malware or implants	reverse-engineer
Security incident coordination after AI abuse	incident-responder

Core Workflows

1. Scope and rules of engagement

1. Define target: model, app surface, tools, data stores
2. Obtain written authorization and time window
3. Agree out-of-scope (e.g., no social engineering of employees unless approved)
4. Define success criteria: critical findings, reproduction steps, severity rubric
5. Plan safe test environment (no prod customer data)

See references/engagement_scope.md for ROE template and severity definitions.

2. Threat model for LLM applications

Class	Examples
Prompt injection	Instructions in user/doc content override system policy
Jailbreak	Role-play, encoding, multi-turn coercion
Tool abuse	Unauthorized API calls, parameter injection
Data exfiltration	RAG leaks other tenants' chunks, PII in logs
Supply chain	Malicious tool definitions, compromised plugins
Denial of service	Token burn, recursive agent loops

See references/attack_catalog.md for technique families and test prompts (use ethically).

3. Test execution

Phases:

1. Baseline — document intended refusals and allowed behaviors
2. Automated sweep — harness with curated attack set + fuzz mutations
3. Manual creativity — domain-specific abuse scenarios
4. Tool/RAG focus — indirect injection via retrieved documents
5. Regression — re-run after mitigations

Log: input, output, tool calls, latency, whether guardrail fired.

See references/testing_harness.md for harness design and datasets.

4. Reporting

Each finding includes:

• Title and severity (impact × likelihood)
• Steps to reproduce (minimal)
• Evidence (redacted transcripts)
• Affected component
• Recommended mitigation
• Retest criteria

See references/reporting.md for report template and remediation tracking.

5. Mitigation validation

Mitigation	Retest
Input/output filters	Bypass attempts with paraphrases
System prompt hardening	Injection via RAG context
Tool allowlists	Confused deputy and scope creep
Human approval gate	Automated agent bypass paths

See references/mitigations.md for defense depth and known weak controls.

When to load references

• ROE and scope → references/engagement_scope.md
• Attack types → references/attack_catalog.md
• Harness and automation → references/testing_harness.md
• Reports → references/reporting.md
• Defenses → references/mitigations.md