AI-driven products expose organizations to a range of vulnerabilities – such as model poisoning, prompt injection, and data leakage – that do not exist in traditional software. Because these risks are unique, they require security tests designed specifically for AI workloads. However, even the best individual test cannot uncover every weakness. Robust protection requires a combination of methods – static code analysis, dynamic API fuzzing, adversarial example generation, red team simulations, and more – brought together in a single comprehensive program.
Belitsoft is the AI software security testing company you hire to test your AI from every angle – web, mobile, API, and LLM. Whether your product is AI chatbot, a mobile ML app, or a cloud model API, Belitsoft gives you confidence.
Types of AI Applications & Their Security Considerations
1. Web-Based AI Products
A browser front end does not protect an AI service from ordinary web threats: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, misconfigured cloud storage, and more still apply. The AI component can be tricked with carefully crafted images or text. An attacker might upload an adversarial image that forces an image recognition model to mislabel sensitive content, or inject a prompt that persuades a chatbot to reveal information it should keep private. The remedy is: continue to enforce the familiar OWASP controls that keep any web app safe, and add AI-specific tests that attempt to confuse the model with malicious inputs. Sensitive prompts, hidden APIs, and training data must never appear in responses or front-end code.
2. Mobile AI Apps
When AI functionality goes inside a mobile binary, competitors can reverse engineer an APK or IPA and steal the embedded model or its API keys. If the mobile app captures voice or camera data, weak encryption exposes that personal information in transit. The safest design is to keep proprietary models and secrets on the server and call them over well-protected channels. When on-device inference is necessary, models should be stored in encrypted or obfuscated form, traffic must use TLS with certificate pinning, and the code should include runtime protection against tampering. Static and dynamic AI software security testing scans validate that no secrets leak and that communications are genuinely secure.
3. AI APIs and Back-End Services
Many companies offer their model strictly through cloud APIs. Without limits, adversaries can hammer these endpoints, drain GPU capacity, or even reconstruct the model through repeated queries. Standard API hardening – strong authentication, fine-grained permissions, network isolation, and full encryption – remains essential. Equally important are usage throttles, anomaly monitoring, and subtle output watermarking that make large-scale data harvesting unprofitable. Logs should flag sudden spikes in traffic or unusual query patterns that hint at model extraction or denial-of-service attempts.
4. Large Language Model Integrations
LLMs power chatbots, content generators, and autonomous agents. Their chief weakness is “prompt injection”, in which a user’s text quietly overrides the system’s instructions, causing the model to disclose confidential data or perform unintended tasks. If an application renders model output directly as HTML or executes generated code, this risk grows. A defensible design keeps roles strictly separated in the prompt, demands that the model return structured data (for example, JSON) rather than free-form code, and places any code execution inside a tightly sandboxed environment. Usage limits, continuous log analysis, and periodic red-team testing help executives see whether these controls hold up under creative attack.
5. Board-Level Implications
AI software security testing is an extension of modern application security. Encrypt data everywhere, hide proprietary model assets, enforce strong identity and rate limits on every endpoint, and monitor for abuse. These measures protect intellectual property, and limit cloud costs, maintain regulatory compliance, and preserve customer trust while the business innovates with AI.
AI software security testing Techniques
Delivering secure AI requires several kinds of testing that work together, much like overlapping layers of defense in physical security. No single approach can find every weakness, so the teams you fund and oversee should use all six methods below.
1. Adversarial testing (often called AI red teaming)
Specialists act like determined attackers and feed the model inputs designed to fool or corrupt it – altered images for vision systems, creative prompts for chatbots, extreme scenarios for reinforcement learning agents. The goal is to learn where the AI breaks before real attackers or regulators do. Findings feed directly into model guardrails, filters, and retraining plans.
2. Penetration testing
Ethical hackers look for any path – technical or logical – that lets them steal data, damage the service, or misuse the AI. They combine classic application attacks with newer tactics such as prompt injection or model inversion. External pen tests provide an independent reality check and are increasingly required by regulators. Schedule them at least once a year and before major releases.
3. Fuzz testing
Automated tools bombard code and models with huge numbers of unpredictable or malformed inputs to trigger crashes, infinite loops, or policy-violating outputs. Fuzzing is excellent at uncovering the obscure defects that only surface under odd conditions – defects that can still cause outages or breaches in production. Run fuzz campaigns continuously in your CI/CD pipeline so new code is stress tested automatically.
4. Static code analysis (SAST)
This is a “white box” scan of source code and build artifacts before anything runs. It flags obvious mistakes – hardcoded secrets, unsafe file operations, outdated libraries – while the fix is still cheap. SAST should cover every language in use, including infrastructure as code scripts.
5. Dynamic analysis (DAST)
Where SAST looks at code at rest, DAST probes the live application from the outside. It spots misconfigurations, broken authentication flows, and hostile inputs that slip past earlier checks. Run DAST in staging as part of release gates and in production under tight safeguards.
6. Threat modeling and risk assessment
Before code is written – or when adding a major feature – architects map out assets, possible attacks, and planned defenses. Classic STRIDE thinking still applies, but the model must now include AI-specific threats such as data poisoning, model theft, and harmful outputs. The resulting document guides design decisions, budgets, and compliance filings (for example, GDPR impact assessments).
Best Practices for AI Software Security Testing
For Founders and Security Leaders
Security and privacy must be treated as core product features, not optional add-ons. From day one, set up a lightweight information security management system – even if you are a five-person startup. That system anchors a compliance roadmap that grows with the company: GDPR for customer data, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 for trust with enterprise buyers, HIPAA if you handle health information, and so on.
Routine assurance is essential. Automated scans should run on every code change. Penetration tests should follow each major release. Once a year, commission a deeper, red team-style engagement and run an incident response drill. If full-time expertise is out of reach, hire a virtual CISO or open a bug bounty program to attract outside talent.
Treat data as an asset that requires classification and governance. Know which buckets hold personal data, model weights, or third-party IP, and lock them down accordingly. Do the same for your supply chain: vet open source libraries, pretrained models, and external APIs before they enter production.
Finally, recognize that AI introduces new failure modes. Instrumentation must watch for model theft, prompt injection attempts, toxic outputs, and unexpected behavior. Create an ethics review gate so features likely to cause social or regulatory backlash are examined early. Stay close to emerging AI software security testing research – the field moves faster than traditional IT security.
For Developers and Engineers
Secure coding skills are now table stakes. Know the OWASP Top 10 for web, mobile, and – more recently – the LLM Top 10. Automate security in the pipeline: static code analysis, dependency checks, and container scans should trigger on every commit.
Start each feature with a quick threat model discussion. Ask: What can go wrong? Then design defensive measures upfront. At runtime, accept no input – text, files, prompts – without validation and sanitization. Likewise, never pass raw model output straight to the user or another system; apply content moderation, rate limits, or sandboxed execution as appropriate.
Follow least privilege everywhere: service accounts, database roles, and LLM tool plug-ins should only do what they must. Store model artifacts in private, encrypted locations; consider watermarking outputs and alerting on unusual access patterns.
Log events that matter to security investigations, but filter out personal data before it reaches the log file. Write unit tests for your security assumptions and add adversarial or fuzz tests where AI is involved.
Instead of Conclusion
Some quality assurance providers already offer the full spectrum of functional, performance, and security tests. Engaging a one-stop vendor streamlines procurement, eliminates the gaps that can arise when multiple niche firms transfer work between each other, and creates a single point of accountability. Finally, the threat landscape is constantly evolving as attackers continually refine their exploits and AI models evolve with each retraining cycle. For that reason, security cannot be a one-and-done project. It must be an ongoing partnership, where the AI software security testing vendor works alongside the product team to update test suites and threat models as the environment changes.
About the Author:
Dmitry Baraishuk is a partner and Chief Innovation Officer at a AI software security testing company Belitsoft (a Noventiq company). He has been leading a department specializing in custom software development for 20 years. The department has hundreds of successful projects in such services as AI software development, healthcare and finance IT consulting, application modernization, cloud migration, data analytics implementation, and more for startups and enterprises in the US, UK, and Canada.
