What skills does an AI security specialist need?
Short answer
A mix of core security skills (threat modeling, application security, cloud and identity) and an understanding of how AI systems work and fail: prompt injection, data leakage, model supply chain, agent permissions, and frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF.
The details
Governance skills are increasingly part of AI security, because organizations need policies, inventories and risk assessments for the AI tools they adopt.
Useful next reads and tools
- AI Security guides · guide
Terms explained
- MITRE ATLAS
- MITRE ATLAS is a public knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques against AI-enabled systems, modeled on MITRE ATT&CK.
- NIST AI RMF
- The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is voluntary guidance for managing AI risks, organized into four functions: Govern, Map, Measure and Manage.
- OWASP Top 10
- The OWASP Top 10 is an awareness list of the most critical security risks to web applications, published by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project.
- Prompt injection
- Prompt injection is an attack on AI applications in which crafted input, typed directly or hidden in content the model reads, overrides the developer’s instructions.
Sources
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