AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is attack surface?
Attack surface: The total set of points where an attacker can try to interact with or affect a system, such as input boxes, APIs, uploaded files, retrieved documents, tools and model files. Reducing the number and power of these points makes a system easier to defend.
Attack surface: an example
A chatbot that also reads uploaded PDFs and browses the web has a larger attack surface than one that only answers typed questions.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Automated red teaming
- Backdoor attack
- Benchmark saturation
- Canary token
- Chatbot Arena
- Citation checking
- Constitutional classifiers
- Content moderation
Where you learn it
Attack surface is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.