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Pwn, Patch, Prove — A Red+Blue Masterclass on the Cloud-Native AI Kill Chain

live online
price $1,400
Neeraj Godkhindi
Intermediate / Advanced
2 Days
Cloud Security & Offensive Testing
Sat 28 Nov - Sun 29 Nov
price $1,400
Register


Online, Available in English

Overview

Modern cloud-native platforms ship AI features in months, not years — and they ship the entire five-layer attack surface with them. A single Python bug cascades into container root; container root hands over a Kubernetes ServiceAccount token; the token reads cloud metadata; a cloud OAuth token reads every bucket in the project; and an LLM with tool-calling loops the entire chain back to remote code execution. A single adversarial prompt can now become cluster-admin. This two-day masterclass puts every attack in that chain in the student's hands on Day 1, and every defence in the student's hands on Day 2 — on a Kubernetes cluster they bootstrap, harden, and deploy to from scratch.

The class is engineered to a single binary acceptance gate: 42/42 PASS → 42/42 FAIL. On Day 1 every student personally executes 42 machine-verified attacks — OS command injection, SQL injection, SSRF-to-IMDS, public GCS bucket exfiltration, wildcard Kubernetes RBAC, stolen GCP OAuth tokens, prompt injection against Vertex AI Gemini 2.5, RAG poisoning, LLM tool-call RCE, and a 7-step full chain that closes the loop from Python back to the model. A PowerShell harness records evidence, tags each attack with the GCC control it breaches (SAMA-CSF, NCA-ECC, NCA-CCC, PDPL), and produces a reproducible audit log. On Day 2 the same student bootstraps a 2-node Kubernetes cluster on Ubuntu 22.04, installs the full defensive stack (Cilium eBPF, Kyverno + OPA, Istio with STRICT mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, SealedSecrets + Vault, KubeArmor kernel enforcement, Falco detection, Harbor + Tekton + ArgoCD, full observability), and runs the same harness against the cluster they built — it now returns PASS: 0 FAIL: 42.

This is not a slide deck. Every command is copy-paste runnable. Every defence is mapped to the exact red-team row it neutralises. Every finding carries an audit artefact — Kyverno admission log, Cilium drop flow, KubeArmor block event, Falco alert, Cosign attestation — that a GCC financial regulator (SAMA, NCA, SAMA-CSF) will accept as evidence. Students leave with two log files, a signed audit zip, and the muscle memory to rebuild the same pipeline against any GitHub URL in their own organisation on Monday morning.

Topics:

  • Target tour + environment setup
  • Lab 01 — OS Command Injection (4 attacks)
  • Lab 02 — SQL Injection (4 attacks)
  • Lab 03 — Path Traversal / LFI (5 attacks)
  • Lab 04 — SSRF (3 attacks)
  • Lab 05 — Hardcoded Secrets (2 attacks)
  • Lab 06 — Public GCS Bucket (3 attacks
  • Lab 07 — Container Misconfiguration (3 attacks)
  • Lab 08 — Cluster RBAC (3 attacks
  • Lab 09 — GCP IMDS + IAM (3 attacks)
  • Lab 10 — AI Layer (5 attacks) Lab 11 — Full Attack Chain (7 steps) + harness acceptance
  • Blue-lab provisioning. Kubeadm bootstrap
  • Cilium CNI + Hubble (Phase 3)
  • Core security operators (Phase 4)
  • M1: Cilium IMDS deny + default-deny egress
  • M2: KubeArmor kernel-level enforcement
  • M3: Istio mTLS + AuthorizationPolicy + ratelimit
  • M4: Falco custom detection rules
  • M5: Vault + SealedSecrets
  • M6: GCS bucket hardening
  • M7: Kyverno admission 
  • M8: Pipeline rebuild (live demo)
  • M9: Envoy Lua AI output PII redaction + Cosign-attested RAG corpus


Target Audience:

This class is built for MEA practitioners who already touch cloud-native stacks and want to close the red/blue loop
end-to-end in two days. Specifically:
• Offensive security engineers and red-teamers adding cloud-native + AI/LLM targets to their playbook
• Platform engineers, SREs, and Kubernetes administrators responsible for cluster security posture at MEA banks, telcos, healthcare, and government
• Blue team / SOC leads building detection content for OWASP LLM Top 10 and cloud-native kill chains 
• DevSecOps leads and pipeline architects tasked with building "one URL in, hardened deploy out" CI/CD 
• Security architects designing zero-trust Kubernetes + AI deployments 
• GRC engineers, auditors, and compliance leads who need to translate SAMA-CSF, NCA-ECC, NCACCC, and PDPL controls into concrete technical evidence 

Prerequisites. Comfort with Linux CLI, HTTP basics, Docker fundamentals, and Kubernetes primitives (Pod, Service, Deployment, ServiceAccount). Read-level Python. No prior experience required with Vertex AI, Istio, Cilium, Kyverno, OPA, Cosign, Falco, KubeArmor, Tekton, ArgoCD, Vault, or Harbor — every tool is introduced at the point of use.

Not a fit for. Students with zero Kubernetes exposure (pace is too fast); students expecting theory-only / slidedeck classes; students unable to run PowerShell 5.1 or PowerShell Core 7 locally.

By the end of this course, the participant will be able to: 

  • Map any cloud-native stack to the 5C model (Code · Container · Cluster · Cloud · AI) and enumerate the typical attack surface at each layer.
  • Chain a single application-layer bug through all five layers to cluster-admin and cloud-project-editor, reproducibly, in under 10 minutes, with documented evidence.
  • Exploit the three dominant LLM vulnerability patterns — prompt injection, tool-call RCE, RAG poisoning — live against a Vertex AI Gemini 2.5 backend.
  • Bootstrap a 2-node Kubernetes cluster from bare Ubuntu with encrypted etcd, CIS Kubernetes Level 2 baseline, Cilium eBPF CNI, Istio mesh, and full observability in under 60 minutes.
  • Apply nine progressive layers of defensive controls — admission (Kyverno/OPA), network (Cilium), mesh (Istio+SPIFFE), kernel (KubeArmor+AppArmor), detection (Falco), secrets (Vault+SealedSecrets), cloud (GCS+CMEK+VPC-SC), pipeline (Tekton+Cosign+ArgoCD), AI output (Envoy Lua + Cosign attestation) — and measure each layer's exact impact on the 42-row harness.
  • Design a one-URL-in secure CI/CD pipeline that takes any GitHub repository as input and enforces nine blocking gates: SAST (Semgrep + Snyk), secrets (Gitleaks), SCA (Trivy + Grype), image SBOM (Syft), image signing (Cosign), admission policy (Kyverno), cluster posture (kube-bench + kube-hunter), runtime (KubeArmor + Falco).
  • Produce audit-ready evidence artefacts — Kyverno admission logs, Cilium Hubble drop flows, KubeArmor block events, Falco rule-match alerts, Cosign attestations, signed SBOMs, Tekton pipeline runs — mapped
    attack-by-attack to SAMA-CSF, NCA-ECC, NCA-CCC, PDPL, CIS Kubernetes Benchmark, OWASP Top 10,
    OWASP LLM Top 10, NIST SP 800-190, and SLSA L3 controls.
  • Articulate, with a named log line, why every single red-team attack fails on the hardened cluster — the "Red ↔ Blue Control Matrix" is the class's signature one-page deliverable.
  • Leave with two machine-verifiable log files (baseline_pass.log showing 42/42 PASS on Day 1; blue_team_42_fail.log showing 42/42 FAIL on Day 2) and a packaged audit_evidence.zip that together constitute a regulator-grade audit artefact.
  • Continue practising post-class via 90-day access to the lab environment, monthly new-attack challenges for 6 months, and permission to reuse the harness + manuals + bootstrap scripts inside the student's own organisation for 12 months.