DEF CON 34 Trainings: AI Subset and Research Coverage
Table of Contents
- 1. The AI trainings
- 2. Coverage against wal.sh/research
- 2.1. RA-1 Authorization and the credential boundary — covered (ahead)
- 2.2. RA-2 Instruction-surface supply chain — gap (artifact provenance)
- 2.3. RA-3 Evaluating the evaluator — gap (judge reliability)
- 2.4. RA-4 Agentic tooling for analysis — covered (construction only)
- 2.5. RA-5 Governance and accountability — covered (better than expected)
- 3. Summary
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:
- Artifact provenance for agent instruction surfaces — the companion to Tainted Data in LLM Pipelines, applied to what arrives before the agent starts.
- When the judge fails — judge-LLM reliability, anchored by the LGTM talk and Visibility is Verification. Closest to writable of anything in the backlog.