COMPEL Glossary / penetration-testing
Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is the authorized, controlled simulation of real-world attacks against an AI system to identify exploitable security vulnerabilities before malicious actors can discover and exploit them.
What this means in practice
For AI systems, penetration testing must go beyond traditional IT security testing to include AI-specific attack vectors such as model extraction, training data inference, prompt injection, adversarial input manipulation, and jailbreaking attempts. For organizations, regular penetration testing provides evidence-based confidence in security controls. In COMPEL, penetration testing is part of the AI Security Architecture framework in Module 3.3, Article 5.
Related Terms
Other glossary terms mentioned in this entry's definition and context.