Agentic Security: Build, Audit, Break#
A 2-day hands-on class teaching Cisco security engineers how LLMs and AI agents work, how to use them for security work, and how to attack and defend them.
You’ll spend roughly half the class in labs, on your own dedicated cloud instance, with real models. Every lab has a fixed task and an objective answer: a checker script, an answer key, or a flag on the class CTF. By the end you will have written a chat program and an agent from scratch, extended an industrial agent harness, shipped a networked app with an agent, broken an LLM agent’s guardrails, used agents to audit and exploit a deliberately vulnerable app, and implemented an agentic security-evaluation system from an open spec.
No ML/LLM background, agent experience, AWS knowledge, or pentesting experience is assumed — see prerequisites for what is.
New to the class? Start with Module 0: About This Class — the schedule, the lab environment, and how the two days run.
Your portal#
Everything you need to start: open the student portal — sign in to get your lab instance, SSH key, API key, and (on Day 2) your target URLs and credentials.
Leaderboard: https://ctf.class.cloudeval-64.aws.cloud.asig.io — register with any username; submit every flag you capture.
Schedule at a glance#
Six modules over two days; Module 2 is the longest block of the class (about half of Day 1). Labs 2.1–2.4 are a series of exercises woven through Module 2.
| Module | Lab | |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Foundations + Agents + Build | |
| morning | 1 · LLM Fundamentals | Labs 1.1–1.3: Tokenization, curl, and a Chat Program |
| midday | 2 · Agents: Using and Extending Them (double) | Labs 2.1–2.4: Build an Agent, Then Bend the Harness |
| late afternoon | 3 · Agentic Coding: Build | Lab 3.1: Build ShareBox |
| Day 2 | Applied Agentic Security | |
| morning | 4 · Agent Security | Labs 4.1–4.2: Break the Summarizer, Break the Guardrails |
| midday | 5 · Agents for Security Review | Lab 5.1: Audit the Vulnbox |
| afternoon | 6 · Capstone | Lab 6.1: Implement Foundry-lite + debrief |
The class is built around one arc: build ShareBox with a small, fast model at the close of Day 1 (the free-form build is the day’s sponge — it absorbs whatever time is left), your app freezes overnight, and Day 2 is spent on the attack: break an LLM agent and its guardrails, audit and exploit a deliberately vulnerable ShareBox with a stronger model, then the capstone — implement Foundry, an agentic security-evaluation system, and run it against ShareBox code.
What you should already know#
- Terminal fluency: comfortable in a Linux shell; all lab work happens over a terminal session.
- Basic scripting: able to write simple Python.
- HTTP basics: requests/responses, methods, status codes, headers, JSON payloads.
- Security fundamentals: common vuln classes (injection, broken access control, path traversal) at the OWASP-Top-10 level.
- Git basics: clone, commit, look at a diff.
Explicitly not assumed: ML/LLM background, pi or any agent harness, AWS, or pentesting experience.