Initial Blog Post – "Securing Intelligence: Open-Source AI Across the Lifecycle"



Welcome! I'm Tawfiq Shah, a cybersecurity engineer with over nine years of experience at the intersection of application security, AI/ML risk, and cloud-native infrastructure. My focus is building scalable and secure AI systems that incorporate large language models (LLMs), DevSecOps principles, and emerging risk quantification techniques, such as Generative AI and Monte Carlo simulation.

I'm pursuing my Doctorate in Computer Science with a focus on Cybersecurity and Information Assurance at Colorado Technical University. This blog is part of CS875—Futuring and Innovation, a course designed to explore the human and organizational dimensions of technological change. What excites me most about this course is its emphasis on anticipating innovation and strategically shaping the future of technology, especially in high-impact fields like AI and cybersecurity.

🎯 What This Blog Will Cover

This blog will serve as a thought leadership space centered on securing open-source LLMs across the AI lifecycle, from training and fine-tuning to deployment and monitoring.

Given the rapid proliferation of open-source foundation models and the ease of downstream customization, organizations face a paradox: more power, more exposure. We'll dive into:

  • Threat modeling and vulnerability discovery in open-source LLM frameworks (e.g., LangChain, HuggingFace).
  • Model governance and lifecycle security include prompt injection, data poisoning, and model inversion risks.
  • Integration of FAIR and NIST frameworks with MLOps pipelines.
  • Approaches for future AI risk — i.e., using scenario planning and risk simulation techniques like Monte Carlo and generative models to prepare for what's next.

Expect a blend of research insights, tooling experiments, practical walkthroughs, and reflections from academia and industry.

I'm looking forward to using this space to articulate ideas, challenge assumptions, and explore innovative paths for AI assurance. Thanks for joining me on this journey!

 


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