Certified Advanced AI Security Researcher
Prove advanced offensive and defensive AI security skills across agentic AI, LLM pipelines, and production ML systems through hands-on exploitation and hardening.
Overview
The Certified Advanced AI Security Researcher (CAAISR) certification is a fully hands-on, scenario-driven credential designed to validate advanced offensive and defensive skills across agentic AI, LLM pipelines, and production machine learning systems. It is the advanced follow-up to the CAISR.
Rather than testing theory, CAAISR challenges candidates to operate as advanced AI security researchers. You will inspect model internals and formats, exploit MCP servers, plant and detect model backdoors, run advanced prompt injection and jailbreaking, automate offensive tooling with AI agents, and then harden the same systems with gateways and guardrails.
Who Should Take This
- Experienced security engineers and penetration testers
- Advanced AI and LLM red teamers
- Vulnerability researchers working with AI and ML systems
- AI/ML engineers responsible for security
- AI security consultants operating at an advanced level
Benefits
Advanced AI Security Signal
Prove advanced, verified expertise across the offensive and defensive AI security frontier.
Attack and Defend
Demonstrate you can exploit production AI systems and then harden them with gateways and guardrails.
Model-Level Expertise
Show you can inspect model formats, plant and detect backdoors, and reason about fine-tuning attacks.
Offensive Automation
Prove you can build AI agents that automate web, mobile and code security testing at scale.
MCP and Agent Security
Validate deep skills in exploiting and securing MCP servers and autonomous agent workflows.
Peer Recognition
Use the credential as a concrete signal of advanced technical credibility in AI security.
Exam Objectives
Model Formats and Malicious Models: Inspect model internals (pickle, safetensors, GGUF, ONNX) and detect malicious models using picklescan, ModelScan and fickling.
Advanced Prompt Injection and Jailbreaking: Execute multi-turn Crescendo escalation, encoding bypasses, and reasoning-model exploitation against production AI applications.
MCP Server Exploitation: Exploit tool poisoning, rug-pull attacks, RCE chains and data exfiltration, then build hardened, authenticated MCP servers.
Model Backdoors: Implant and detect backdoors, sleeper agents and LoRA backdoors using techniques such as Neural Cleanse.
AI-Powered Offensive Automation: Build AI agents that automate web and mobile security testing, and LLM-powered code scanning pipelines.
AI Red Teaming at Scale: Red team AI systems with Garak, PyRIT, Promptfoo and DeepTeam, including CI/CD integration.
AI Gateways and Defense-in-Depth: Evaluate and deploy commercial AI gateways (Cloudflare, Portkey, LiteLLM) with BYOK, guardrails and DLP.
Fine-Tuning Attacks and Defenses: Perform advanced fine-tuning attacks and defenses with local MLX workflows on Apple Silicon.
Exam Format
24 hrs + 24hr Reporting
Exam Duration
Report
Final Deliverable
The 24-hour exam is entirely hands-on. You will receive access to a dedicated advanced AI environment containing vulnerable model artifacts, MCP servers, LLM endpoints, autonomous agent systems and AI gateways. An additional 24 hours is provided for report preparation.
Passing Criteria: Your submission is a comprehensive security research report documenting identified vulnerabilities, exploitation methodology, attack chains, proof-of-concepts, impact analysis, and practical remediation guidance.
Certificate: Successful candidates are awarded the 8kSec Certified Advanced AI Security Researcher certification, demonstrating advanced proficiency in attacking and defending AI systems.
Lab Environment
During the exam, you will have access to a dedicated advanced lab environment containing vulnerable AI applications, model artifacts, MCP servers, agent systems and AI gateways with full instructions.
Prerequisites
- Completion of CAISR / Practical AI Security, or equivalent LLM security experience
- Comfortable writing and reading Python to build and modify agent and tooling code
- Familiarity with the command line, Git, and Docker
- Practical skills in exploiting LLM-based systems and bypassing guardrails
- Familiarity with LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP, RAG systems and model formats
Recommended Training
Advanced AI Security: Attacks, Defenses, and Applications
The advanced, build-heavy follow-up to Practical AI Security. Go deep on model-format attacks, AI-powered web and mobile pentesting, LLM code scanning, advanced prompt injection, MCP exploitation, model backdoors, AI red teaming, AI gateways, and local fine-tuning attacks and defenses.
Learn MoreFrequently Asked Questions
Who is this Certification intended for?
Is prior experience required?
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Is training mandatory before taking the exam?
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Ready to Get CAAISR Certified?
Prove your expertise with an industry-recognized certification from 8kSec.