Red Teaming is widely applied in managing risk and threats from adversaries. Specifically, it is a good practice within the development process to identify and address new potential vulnerabilities when engineering solutions to security problems. As such an invaluable step, we believe it’s an important consideration when training new software professionals, ultimately creating a generation of adversarial-minded engineers.

We will discuss Praxis Engineering's 2024 summer software engineering internship project where we designed facial and speech-based user recognition using Machine Learning and low energy wireless communications on microcontrollers. The innovative highlight of this project was implementing Red Teaming: unlike previous internships, we had the task of analyzing our designs from the perspective of an adversary. As a result, we unveiled vulnerabilities that could have been overlooked in a conventional internship project. We will present vulnerabilities and potential mitigations that resulted from our Red Teaming research, as well as how this significantly strengthened the resiliency of our solutions.

Although Red Teaming was novel to us, it proved to be a critical step that we believe can be integrated into any software internship project. We will conclude by emphasizing Red Teaming’s benefits and why more internships should include it in their approach.