Arjen Wiersma

My AI workshop is gaining traction! My next stop will be at BSides Grunn on April 17th.

Last year, I had a very successful session at JFall 2025, where the workshop was rated as the 5th highest talk at the conference. While the session was excellent, I felt it necessary to enhance my platform a bit further.

In order to host the workshop on attacking AI systems, it is important to provide a way for these challenges to be done in a controlled environment. Although there are some options for quickly coding online tools using AI, I believed it essential to create a dedicated platform that enables participants to navigate through custom challenges.

My first iteration was a Spring Boot (Java) tool designed to host the challenges. While it was an adequate setup, the interaction with AI and presentation of the challenges felt somewhat clunky. The next iteration is a significant step forward in terms of features and usability. It is written in Ruby on Rails, the language is not only straightforward to use, but the framework also allows me to focus on the aspects that truly matter. A key advantage behind the scenes is deployability; I can easily implement changes to my production platform. With Rails, it takes just a single command to push changes to production, just like in the 90s.

So, what did I add to my workshop?

• UX: light/dark mode, depending on the system settings
• UX: conversations with AI instead of one-off messages
• AI: support multiple models in case on outages
• AI: allow user to select a more difficult model to see how their solution works
• Admin: a better dashboard to track progress

Next up is to create some really nice custom challenges for the fine folks at BSides!