DEF CON 34 Trainings: AI Subset and Research Coverage

Table of Contents

Sibling to the DEF CON 34 overview. DEF CON Trainings Las Vegas 2026 (DCTLV2026) are the multi-day paid courses that run alongside the conference. This note takes the AI-focused subset and asks a narrow question: which topics does the existing research corpus already own, and which are real gaps?

Caveat: the coverage below is read off note titles and #+DESCRIPTION lines, not a re-reading of each note. "Covered" means a note exists that owns this topic, not the note is current.

1. The AI trainings

Course Instructor(s) Topics
AI Agent Security Masterclass (W232) Bhargav, Prasad prompt injection, excessive agency, tool misuse, MCP supply-chain, authz-to-backend chains
AI SecureOps (W228) Abhinav Singh agent SecOps; judge-LLM workflows
Strategic AI Penetration (W233) --- dataset poisoning
Digital Supply Chain Security --- provenance verification, tampered upstream artifacts, inherited risk
Agentic RE (W229) --- private LLM stacks, custom MCP servers
Agentic AppSec (W204) --- agentic application security
AI + SOC 101 (W235) --- agents in the SOC
Cyber & AI Policy Basics --- executive accountability, regulation, insurance

2. Coverage against wal.sh/research

Three of five areas are already covered, one better than expected. The two gaps are the two the trainings were strongest on.

2.1. RA-1 Authorization and the credential boundary — covered (ahead)

Prompt injection, excessive agency, MCP supply-chain, authz chaining to backend compromise. Owned, and ahead of the syllabus on the MCP authorization gap: Agent Permission Guardrails ("the bottleneck is permissions, not model performance"), Containment Mapping, Four-Boundary Spec Mapping.

2.2. RA-2 Instruction-surface supply chain — gap (artifact provenance)

Tainted Data in LLM Pipelines owns the data half — untrusted input read by an agent becomes injection. The artifact half is absent: no note owns dependency provenance (sigstore, cosign, SLSA, SBOM, pinned installs). The worked example is an installer that writes unpinned, auto-accepted instruction content into every agent directory — injection with a package manager as the delivery vehicle, arriving before the agent starts. The strongest gap.

2.3. RA-3 Evaluating the evaluator — gap (judge reliability)

The trainings list judge-LLM workflows; the conference talk LGTM: Bypassing an LLM Build Gate (see the overview) shows a judge gate defeated without injection. LLM Evaluation is dated 2024 and benchmarks models, not judges; Visibility is Verification argues against trusting a judge but does not treat when judges fail; Elenctic Vibe Code Review is human-in-the-loop. Genuine gap — and the one where the raw material is already assembled.

2.4. RA-4 Agentic tooling for analysis — covered (construction only)

Code-Graph MCP Survey, AI Agent Tool Systems, Agent Telemetry Systems, Agent Deployment Systems. Covered as construction; the attack surface of an agentic tool has no threat model yet. A section in an existing note, not a new one.

2.5. RA-5 Governance and accountability — covered (better than expected)

Agent Identity and Attestation connects identity delegation (git trailers, Co-Authored-By) to compliance attestation and the EU AI Act (Article 50) — the course syllabus with a regulatory citation already attached.

3. Summary

area training research verdict
RA-1 authorization strong strong covered, ahead on MCP authz
RA-2 supply chain strong half gap — artifact provenance
RA-3 evaluating the evaluator strong none gap — judge reliability
RA-4 agentic tooling strong construction only narrow gap — threat model
RA-5 governance (sold out) strong covered

Two notes would close it, both two-repo-agreement candidates for wal.sh/research:

  1. Artifact provenance for agent instruction surfaces — the companion to Tainted Data in LLM Pipelines, applied to what arrives before the agent starts.
  2. When the judge fails — judge-LLM reliability, anchored by the LGTM talk and Visibility is Verification. Closest to writable of anything in the backlog.