PromptTrace

PromptTrace is a free training platform where security professionals learn to attack and defend large language models through hands on practice against real AI systems. Instead of reading about prompt injection in documentation or watching theoretical presentations, you actually exploit production grade models protected by working defenses. The platform covers vulnerabilities mapped to industry standards like the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and MITRE ATLAS, so the skills you build here translate directly to real world red teaming engagements and security audits. It's built by an AI security researcher with over nine years of offensive experience and certifications including OSCP and CREST CRT, bringing practical expertise rather than academic speculation to the curriculum.

The learning path starts with nine structured modules that walk through AI security fundamentals from the ground up. You'll cover tokenization and how it creates attack surfaces at boundaries between tokens, system prompts and the ways they can be extracted or manipulated, retrieval augmented generation pipelines and their unique vulnerabilities when external data enters the prompt context, tool calling and how malicious instructions can hijack function execution, and agentic architectures where autonomous systems compound risks across multiple decision points. Each module explains how these components work at a technical level and identifies exactly where the attack surface lives, giving you the foundation to spot vulnerabilities in any LLM integration you encounter.

Hands on labs put that knowledge into practice across ten challenge scenarios with difficulty ratings from one to five. You'll attempt prompt injection to extract hidden system instructions that developers assumed were protected, generate misinformation that bypasses safety filters through carefully crafted adversarial inputs, poison RAG retrieval systems by manipulating the documents they pull from, and inject malicious outputs through inputs designed to survive model processing. These aren't simulated environments with scripted fake responses. You're interacting with actual large language models protected by real defenses, so success means you've genuinely bypassed working security controls rather than just following a predetermined tutorial path.

The Gauntlet takes the challenge further with seventeen levels of progressively hardened AI systems designed to test the limits of your skills. You face prompt guards that filter suspicious patterns, code guards that prevent execution of generated outputs, and LLM classifiers that attempt to detect adversarial intent before it reaches the main model. Each level increases the sophistication of defenses, requiring new techniques or creative combinations of approaches to crack. It's structured as a capture the flag competition where success proves you can adapt to evolving protections. The entire Gauntlet is completely free, making advanced offensive training accessible to anyone willing to invest the time regardless of their budget for security education.

Beyond the structured curriculum, PromptTrace provides research tools that work outside the learning environment and remain valuable during actual security assessments. The prompt injection cheat sheet catalogs 133 documented attack techniques with searchable payloads you can adapt for your own engagements. Reveal Trace handles encoding and decoding across more than sixty obfuscation methods, which matters because many successful injection attacks depend on bypassing input filters through creative text transformations that look innocuous but decode to something malicious. A resource directory points to over seventy curated AI security tools, certifications, and communities for continuing your education beyond what the platform itself provides.

Context Trace visualizes how prompts flow through a system by showing the distinct layers of system instructions, retrieved documents, available tools, and user input that combine into the final prompt sent to the model. It redacts sensitive values while still revealing the structural relationships that create exploitable vulnerabilities. This visibility helps you understand why certain attacks work and others fail based on where your input lands in the final prompt assembly, which positions matter most for injection, and how different components can be played against each other.

The platform requires no signup for most tools and includes full Arabic translation for broader accessibility across regions where English language security training is harder to find. There are no paid tiers, premium features, or content held behind a paywall. Whether you're a security professional preparing for an AI red team engagement, a developer trying to understand how attackers will probe your own LLM integrations before they ship, or a researcher exploring the evolving attack surface of autonomous agents, PromptTrace gives you practical skills through real exploitation rather than theoretical exercises that never prepare you for actual adversarial conditions.