Global Partners Issue Secure AI Implementation Guidance — April 17, 2024
UK NCSC, CISA, and 18 allied agencies published implementation guidance to operationalize secure-by-design controls for AI systems.
Executive briefing: On the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), CISA, and partners from 18 nations released implementation guidance for the 2023 Guidelines for Secure AI System Development. The document translates high-level principles into concrete controls for model builders, platform providers, and deployers.
What the guidance adds
- Secure design checkpoints. Organizations are urged to establish multidisciplinary threat models, adversarial testing gates, and supply chain reviews before training or integrating models.
- Secure development practices. Recommendations cover dependency management, secret storage, and infrastructure-as-code security for AI pipelines and data engineering workloads.
- Secure deployment and operations. The guidance emphasizes telemetry for model drift, abuse detection, and red-teaming to monitor prompts, outputs, and API consumption.
Risk management implications
- Bridging AI and cyber teams. Security leaders must embed AI specialists into existing secure development lifecycles to meet regulator expectations for emerging model risks.
- Evidence for regulators. Detailed logging and documentation support compliance with EU AI Act risk management, NIST AI RMF, and sectoral safety requirements.
- Third-party oversight. Cloud providers and foundation model vendors are expected to surface attestations on training data provenance, security patching, and incident handling.
Next steps
- Integrate AI-specific threat scenarios into enterprise risk assessments and security review boards.
- Map implementation tasks to secure development standards such as NIST SP 800-218 and OWASP ML/AI Security Top 10.
- Extend vendor risk questionnaires to capture AI lifecycle controls, including data governance, model monitoring, and abuse reporting.