AI Security Foundations

About this paper

This foundation exam assesses whether a candidate understands how AI systems change the security picture: where the attack surface sits, how classic security properties map onto models, and which responsibilities stay with the builder. It is aimed at engineers, architects and security staff who are starting to build or review AI features. Passing demonstrates readiness for the practitioner-level tracks.

What it covers

• The AI attack surface: how natural-language interfaces collapse the code/data distinction
• CIA triad for models: confidentiality, integrity and availability applied to weights, data and serving
• Training-time versus inference-time risk: poisoning, backdoors, jailbreaks and injection
• Model and data supply chain: pretrained artefacts, datasets, serialisation and annotation
• Data handling: PII in prompts and outputs, secrets, and the shared-responsibility split for hosted models
• Operational baselines: layered defence, output handling, logging and auditability

How it is marked

• Questions and answer options are shuffled for every sitting.
• Multi-answer questions are marked as a set: you need all of the correct options and none of the wrong ones. There is no partial credit.
• You need 70% to pass.
• You can revisit and change any answer until you submit.
• Afterwards you see every question, the answer you gave, whether it was right, and the reasoning behind it. The answer key itself is never printed, so the paper stays worth sitting.
• You can re-sit the paper, but not immediately: there is a short wait between attempts.