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Skills application

Skills application
Complete

Building secure ML systems​

In this skills application, you will apply what you’ve learned about secure infrastructure, ML-specific threats, team protocols, and secure workflow design.

Your goal is to design a more secure ML system for a healthcare company facing real-world security concerns.

Skills application illustration

Context​

You are part of the ML team at HealthPredict, a healthcare analytics company developing a predictive model to forecast hospital readmissions. The model is trained on sensitive patient data and deployed via a public-facing API that integrates with hospital systems.

Recently, your team has noticed suspicious access patterns, raising concerns about:

  • Model inversion attacks (where attackers try to reconstruct sensitive inputs from model outputs).
  • Unauthorised API access.

You’ve been asked to assess the system’s security posture and recommend improvements to protect patient data, reduce vulnerabilities, and support secure ML operations.

Success criteria​

  • Identify three relevant vulnerabilities in the current system.
  • Propose a secure infrastructure setup andworkflow improvements.
  • Design two team protocols (Incident Response & Continuous Monitoring) with clear roles.
  • Reflect on the most critical issues and the impact of recommendations on team culture.

Instructions​

1. Vulnerability analysis​

  • Identify three key vulnerabilities based on the model’s lifecycle (data ingestion, training, deployment).
  • For each, map the issue to a relevant security principle (confidentiality, integrity, availability).

2. Secure infrastructure and workflow design​

  • Recommend an infrastructure setup (Local, Cloud, or Hybrid) and justify your choice.
  • Propose at least three workflow improvements (e.g., encryption, API security, access control).

3. Team protocol development​

  • Draft an incident response protocol for breaches.
  • Draft a continuous monitoring protocol to proactively detect threats.
  • Assign responsibilities to roles (Data Engineer, ML Developer, Platform Engineer).

4. Reflection​

  • Which vulnerabilities were most critical and why?
  • How did your changes reduce risks?
  • How could team culture influence the success of these protocols?
Skills application form
Vulnerability analysis: Identify three vulnerabilities and map them to security principles.

Type your analysis here...

Infrastructure & Workflow: Recommend a setup and three improvements.

Type your recommendations here...

Protocol Development: Draft Incident Response and Monitoring protocols with assigned roles.

Type your protocols here...

Reflection: Which vulnerabilities were most critical? How does culture impact success?

Type your reflection here...