Threat Simulation

Threat Simulation lets you test your governance policies against adversarial attack scenarios, identifying coverage gaps before real threats exploit them.

Overview

AI agents face a range of attack vectors, from prompt injection to privilege escalation. Threat Simulation provides a library of pre-built attack scenarios and a custom scenario builder so you can verify that your governance policies catch these threats.

Pre-Built Scenarios

TheWARDN ships with 80+ built-in attack scenarios organized by category:

Prompt Injection

Scenarios where an attacker attempts to manipulate an AI agent through crafted input:

• Direct instruction override attempts
• Indirect injection via data sources
• Context window manipulation
• System prompt extraction attempts

Privilege Escalation

Scenarios where an agent attempts to gain access beyond its authorized scope:

• Tier bypass attempts (acting above assigned tier)
• Grant expiration exploitation
• Cross-agent impersonation
• Role elevation through action chaining

Data Exfiltration

Scenarios where an agent attempts to extract sensitive data:

• Data leakage through outbound actions
• Encoding-based exfiltration attempts
• Side-channel information disclosure
• Bulk data access patterns

Policy Evasion

Scenarios designed to circumvent governance rules:

• Action type aliasing (renaming actions to avoid blocks)
• Confidence score manipulation
• Rate limit circumvention through action splitting
• Reasoning field exploitation

Denial of Service

Scenarios targeting governance pipeline availability:

• Action flooding
• Escrow queue saturation
• Hash chain computation overload

Custom Scenario Builder

Build your own threat scenarios when the pre-built library does not cover your specific concerns:

1. Define the attack vector and objective
2. Configure the simulated agent behavior
3. Set up the sequence of actions the attacker would attempt
4. Run the scenario against your current policies
5. Review the results

TIP

Custom scenarios are saved to your library for future re-use. Build scenarios that reflect the specific threat model of your industry and deployment.

Running Simulations

To run a threat simulation:

1. Select one or more scenarios from the library
2. Choose which policy set to test against (current production or a draft set)
3. Click Run Simulation
4. Review the results

Simulation Results

For each scenario, the results show:

Field	Description
Scenario	Name and description of the attack
Actions Attempted	Number of actions the attacker tried
Caught	How many actions were blocked or held by governance
Missed	How many actions slipped through
Policies That Fired	Which policies detected the attack
Coverage	Percentage of attack actions that were caught

Coverage Gap Identification

After running simulations, TheWARDN identifies coverage gaps -- attack scenarios where some or all malicious actions were not caught by current policies. For each gap, the system provides:

• Which attack actions were missed
• Why existing policies did not catch them
• Suggested policy changes to close the gap

WARNING

A coverage gap does not necessarily mean you are vulnerable -- it means your governance policies did not catch the simulated attack. Review each gap in context to determine whether a policy change is warranted or whether the scenario does not apply to your deployment.

Regular Testing

Run threat simulations on a regular cadence, especially:

• After adding or modifying policies
• After registering new agents
• After changing tier mappings
• Before compliance audits
• When new attack vectors are added to the library

Related Features

• Governance Lab -- General-purpose policy testing sandbox
• Governance Policies -- Create policies to close coverage gaps
• Compliance Packs -- Pre-built policy sets designed for regulatory coverage