Writing Secure Software for the Internet

Why Smarter. Smarter assumes that a model will eventually try to do something it should not, and defends against it with deterministic controls rather than instructions. That makes it a rich case study in both classic web security and the new attacks on AI systems: prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, and server-side request forgery through tool calls.

Look at. The guardrails in smarter/smarter/apps/guardrail/data/guardrails/, the hardened outbound HTTP code in smarter/smarter/apps/plugin/plugin/safe_http.py, encrypted Secrets, and the bandit, detect-private-key and detect-aws-credentials hooks in .pre-commit-config.yaml.

Read. Security, Security FAQ, Smarter Guardrail, ADR 016 on security.

Exercises.

• Red team, blue team. One team builds an LLMClient that guards a secret. The other tries to extract it with prompt injection. Then add guardrails, and try again. The journal records every attempt and every intervention.

• Map Smarter’s defenses to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and the OWASP Top 10.

• Explain why an API plugin’s credentials never appear in a prompt, and why a plugin may only fetch public https addresses.

• Write a responsible disclosure report for a weakness that they find, and discuss how open source projects handle security reports.

Course plans. Three complete, ready-to-teach plans, each with a schedule, graded assignments and rubrics, two capstone projects, recommended texts, further study and technical prerequisites. See Course Formats and Grading for what the formats have in common.

• Classroom bootcamp: 8 hours
• Two-week online course: 6 hours
• Four-week online course: 12 hours

See the Smarter Instructor Guide to install Smarter and set up a class.