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Guidance

Guidelines for secure AI system development

Guidelines for providers of any systems that use artificial intelligence (AI), whether those systems have been created from scratch or built on top of tools and services provided by others.

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Guidelines

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The guidelines are broken down into four key areas within the AI system development life cycle: secure design, secure development, secure deployment, and secure operation and maintenance. For each area, we suggest considerations and mitigations that will help reduce the overall risk to the organisational AI system development process.

The guidelines set out in this document are aligned closely to software development life cycle practices defined in:

1 NIST is tasked with producing guidelines (and taking other actions) to advance the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). See NIST’s Responsibilities Under the October 30, 2023 Executive Order

  • Secure design

    This section contains guidelines that apply to the design stage of the AI system development life cycle. It covers understanding risks and threat modelling, as well as specific topics and trade-offs to consider on system and model design.

  • Secure development This section contains guidelines that apply to the development stage of the AI system development life cycle, including supply chain security, documentation, and asset and technical debt management.
  • Secure deployment This section contains guidelines that apply to the deployment stage of the AI system development life cycle, including protecting infrastructure and models from compromise, threat or loss, developing incident management processes, and responsible release.
  • Secure operation and maintenance This section contains guidelines that apply to the secure operation and maintenance stage of the AI system development life cycle. It provides guidelines on actions particularly relevant once a system has been deployed, including logging and monitoring, update management and information sharing.

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