AI Red Teaming and Adversarial Testing
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What This Requires
Conduct structured adversarial testing — including prompt injection, jailbreaking, data extraction, and goal hijacking attempts — against all AI systems before production deployment and on a recurring schedule. Testing must cover both the AI model layer and the application integration layer, with documented findings triaged by severity and remediated within defined SLAs.
Why It Matters
AI systems exhibit unique failure modes that traditional penetration testing does not cover, including prompt injection bypasses, safety alignment circumvention, and unintended data leakage through model responses. Without dedicated red teaming, organizations remain blind to adversarial attack surfaces that threat actors are actively exploiting in the wild. Structured adversarial testing provides empirical evidence of system robustness and feeds directly into risk management decisions.
How To Implement
Establish Red Team Charter and Scope
Define a formal red team charter that specifies in-scope AI systems, testing frequency (pre-deployment plus quarterly recurring), authorized attack techniques, and escalation procedures. Assign red team roles to personnel with both cybersecurity and AI/ML expertise, or engage specialized third-party firms with demonstrated AI adversarial testing capabilities.
Develop AI-Specific Attack Playbooks
Create and maintain a library of attack playbooks covering prompt injection (direct and indirect), jailbreak techniques (role-playing, encoding bypasses, multi-turn escalation), training data extraction, RAG poisoning, tool-use abuse, and goal hijacking for agentic systems. Update playbooks quarterly to incorporate newly published attack research and CVEs.
Execute and Document Testing Campaigns
Run testing campaigns in a controlled environment that mirrors production configuration. Log every test case with input, expected behavior, actual behavior, and severity classification. Use standardized taxonomies (e.g., OWASP LLM Top 10 categories) to classify findings and ensure comparability across campaigns.
Remediate and Verify Findings
Triage findings by severity using the organization's risk framework, assign remediation owners, and track through resolution. Critical and high-severity findings must be remediated before production deployment or within 14 days for recurring tests. Conduct regression testing to confirm fixes are effective and do not introduce new vulnerabilities.
Evidence & Audit
- Red team charter with scope, frequency, and authorized techniques
- Attack playbook library with version history and update log
- Test campaign reports with individual finding details and severity ratings
- Remediation tracking records showing SLA compliance
- Regression test results confirming fix effectiveness
- Third-party red team engagement contracts and deliverables (if applicable)
- Executive summary briefings presented to governance board