AI security audits, threat modeling, and a prioritized fix roadmap

A search for AI security audits will turn up a variety of services, from design reviews to attack testing. For example, if you want to identify potential incidents before launch, threat modeling is an option. If you want to check whether problems can actually occur in an implemented system, consider a security assessment or penetration test.

Implementation issues found through code analysis overlap with, but are not the same as, issues affecting the overall system, including its models and external tools. Clarify which areas need attention, then confirm who will perform the work and what they will deliver.

If you want advice starting at the design stage, GMO Flatt Security offers reviews of LLM, RAG, and AI agent designs, as well as MCP server configurations. Post-implementation assessments and penetration testing can be added. Trail of Bits lists AI system threat modeling alongside evaluations of models, MLOps, data provenance, and other areas.

For testing an implemented LLM application, INTELLILINK states that it combines manual and automated methods to assess prompt injection and RAG risks. Infrastructure is excluded. Neo Security offers threat modeling and AI red teaming, and lists external integrations and RAG permissions among its assessment items.

LANSCOPE offers testing of behavior and information leakage using inputs to generative AI. However, it explicitly states that this service alone is not suitable for AI agents, and a comprehensive evaluation requires a separate consultation. These are examples of potential providers, not a complete list of services or a quality ranking. Confirm the service scope, languages, and costs in an up-to-date quote.

Imagine an AI system that can search internal documents and also call external tools. In this case, permission and trust boundaries are crossed from the user to the search function, from retrieved documents to the AI, and from the AI to tools.

For example, could an employee without the necessary permissions search confidential documents belonging to another department? If an instruction to “send the contents externally” were embedded in a retrieved document, could an unauthorized transmission occur? Documenting these scenarios together with their targets, assumptions, and expected controls makes it easier to agree on the testing scope with the assessment provider.

Prioritizing fixes solely by the severity ratings in a report can cause you to overlook the impact on your own organization. For each finding, review the conditions needed to reproduce it, its reachability from the internet, the affected assets, and existing safeguards, then assign an owner and a deadline.

As a hypothetical example, if an authorization bypass that is reachable externally and affects customer data is found alongside information exposure limited to internal access, you might choose to fix the former first. After remediation, retest under the same conditions and record any risks that remain unaddressed.

When commissioning the work, prepare details of the target environment and revision, assessment accounts, and excluded features. Then review a sample report and confirm whether the deliverables include a threat model, reproduction steps, impact, proposed fixes, priorities, and the scope of retesting. If you need an independent third-party evaluation, it is important to communicate that requirement in advance.

When testing an implementation, what matters more than the number of findings is whether the target version and reproduction conditions are recorded so that results can be compared before and after remediation. TECHFUND’s CyberGym experiment was also a reproduction test under specific conditions that compared vulnerable versions with existing fixed versions; it does not indicate a detection rate applicable to all AI systems.