CAIS study guide
CAIS · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
CAIS - often expanded as the Certificate of AI Security and associated with the Cloud Security Alliance - is positioned as an AI security credential for practitioners who must govern, build, and defend machine-learning systems rather than conventional cloud infrastructure alone. One important caveat frames everything on this page: the CSA education page for CAIS returned a 404 Not Found error when retrieved. The CAIS study guide has 8 sections and about 2,529 words.
01AI Governance
This domain tests whether you can place an AI system inside an accountability structure: who approves it, which rules apply, and what evidence proves compliance. Expect questions on framework mapping (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act) and on the artifacts that make governance auditable.
325 words, about 2 min02Risk Management and Policy
This domain tests how you identify, score, treat and document AI risk, and how you turn that into policy people can follow. Questions often ask which control addresses a named risk or what a policy must contain.
317 words, about 2 min03AI Threat Landscape and Adversarial Machine Learning
This domain tests attacker goals and techniques against ML systems, and whether you can name the stage at which an attack occurs. Expect taxonomy questions plus scenario questions about LLM applications.
305 words, about 2 min04AI Data Security, Privacy and Responsible Data Handling
This domain tests protection of training, fine-tuning and retrieval data across its lifecycle, plus privacy engineering choices that survive regulatory scrutiny. Core rules Classify data, minimize collection, limit purpose, and keep provenance so a source can be audited or removed.
302 words, about 2 min05Secure AI Development
This domain tests whether security is designed into AI builds rather than bolted on after training. Questions cover the secure development lifecycle, supply-chain integrity and secure serving.
305 words, about 2 min06Model Lifecycle and MLOps Security
This domain tests control of the model after development: versioning, promotion, deployment, monitoring handoff and retirement. It is about the pipeline and the registry, not the code review that produced the model.
324 words, about 2 min07AI Security Monitoring
This domain tests detection: what you log from an AI system, what normal looks like, and which signals indicate attack rather than quality decay. Core rules Log prompts, completions, tool calls, retrieved document IDs, model version, token counts, latency, safety-filter hits and caller identity - with redaction of sensitive content.
318 words, about 2 min08Incident Response and Assurance
This domain tests what you do when an AI system misbehaves, and how you prove afterwards that controls work. It joins AI-specific response actions with the assurance evidence auditors and regulators expect.
333 words, about 2 min