AI Superstream: Securing Agentic Systems

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction – Andreas Welsch (5 minutes)

Andreas welcomes you to the AI Superstream.

Who’s Behind the Agent? Securing AI at the Edge – Vicki Reyzelman (35 minutes)

AI agents don’t browse; they act. They shop, transact, and call your APIs on behalf of real users, and they’re already a fast-growing slice of your traffic. That breaks every assumption baked into your WAF and bot tools, which were built to ask “human or bot?” Agents force a harder question: who’s behind this one, what does it want, and should it be allowed to act? Vicki Reyzelman, a senior solutions engineer at Akamai, gives you a working model for securing agents across their real attack surface: verify identity and tie it to a human, infer intent to catch good actions chained toward bad outcomes, rein in over-permissioned API access, and enforce trust at the edge in real time. You’ll leave knowing where legacy defenses break, and how to shape agentic traffic instead of fearing it.

Your Agent Needs a Steering Wheel – Sandhya Subramani (35 minutes)

How can we build autonomous agents that have room to reason without allowing unchecked decisions? Whether reviewing loan applications, handling medical requests, triaging security incidents, resolving customer issues, or operating in other high-stakes environments, agents need to adapt while still following required steps, respecting approval boundaries, recovering from tool failures, and communicating in the right tone. Prompts cannot reliably control behavior throughout execution, guardrails often catch problems only at the input or output layer, and rigid workflows sacrifice flexibility. Senior developer advocate Sandhya Subramani introduces steering, a just-in-time guidance mechanism inside the agent loop that applies deterministic control at runtime. Through a live demo using an open source agentic framework, you’ll learn how to influence agent actions, guide recovery, enforce required steps, shape conversational boundaries, and add approval points, all without sacrificing the flexibility that makes agents useful.

Break (5 minutes)

The Agentic Attack Surface: How Autonomous AI Gets Compromised and How to Stop It – Sagar Rao (35 minutes)

Most agentic breaches start with someone manipulating the agent through the content it reads, then abusing the fact that the agent can act far beyond what the task requires. AWS senior technical account manager Sagar Rao takes you through how an agentic attack unfolds, from a hidden instruction planted in a trusted source, to the agent chaining its own tools, and finally to a quiet data leak. He pairs each stage with the control that stops it. You’ll leave with a repeatable defense-in-depth pattern and a practical checklist you can apply to your own agents, independent of which model, framework, or tools you use.

When Agents Go Off-Script: Prompt Injection, Hijacking, and Goal Misalignment – Udita Patel (35 minutes)

Once an LLM can browse, call tools, and act on retrieved content, every untrusted token becomes a potential instruction, and the classic distinction between data and command collapses. Udita Patel, senior applied scientist at Amazon, takes a science-driven look at three failure modes that matter most in production: indirect prompt injection through tools and retrieved context, agent hijacking across multistep and multi-agent workflows, and goal misalignment, where an agent pursues a plausible objective, but not the one you asked for. You’ll see how these attacks work and what defense-in-depth looks like when the attack surface is the agent’s own reasoning loop. Take away a concrete threat model for your own agents and a set of mitigations you can evaluate against it.

Break (5 minutes)

Session to Come (35 minutes)

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Session to Come (35 minutes)

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Closing Remarks – Andreas Welsch (5 minutes)

Andreas closes out today’s event.