New Delhi, India — 29 April 2026 — Codec Networks Pvt. Ltd., a CERT-In empanelled information security auditing organisation, participated in CERT-In SAMVAD 2026, the Annual Conference of CERT-In Empanelled Auditing Organisations, held from 27 to 29 April 2026 at BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus under the theme “Securing Digital Bharat through Future-Ready Audits: Adapting, Assuring, Advancing.”
Codec Networks was represented by a senior delegation comprising Arvind Mittal, Chairman and Managing Director; Piyush Mittal, Director, Business Governance; and Gaurav Pant, Technical Director, Security Assessment Services. During the conference, Codec Networks was presented with the CERT-In SAMVAD 2026 recognition plaque on stage, and Gaurav Pant received CERT-In’s Certificate of Participation signed by Dr. Sanjay Bahl, Director General, CERT-In; Shri S. S. Sarma, Scientist ‘G’, CERT-In; and Shri Ashutosh Bahuguna, Scientist ‘E’, CERT-In.
On Day 2 of the conference, 28 April 2026, Gaurav Pant delivered a technical session in the Auditorium, Track 1, titled “Beyond Pentesting: Real-World Red Teaming & Adversarial Assessments Against Modern Enterprises.” The session set out why point-in-time vulnerability assessment and penetration testing no longer answer the question that matters most to a CISO: if an attacker were operating against this estate today, would the organisation detect and contain them? Modern breaches, the session argued, are malware-free and identity-driven, unfold as multi-stage chains across identities, endpoints, cloud and applications, and are increasingly accelerated by adversarial use of AI.
“Security effectiveness is no longer measured by the number of vulnerabilities you found last quarter. It is measured by your ability to detect, respond to and contain real adversarial activity, continuously. AI lets us simulate that adversary at scale, but only if AI executes and humans control. Hybrid by design, not by afterthought.”
— Gaurav Pant, Technical Director, Security Assessment Services, Codec Networks Pvt. Ltd. [confirm quote]
Alongside the session, Codec Networks published a technical paper, “Controlled AI-Based Autonomous Red Teaming Model,” authored by Gaurav Pant, Head of Information Security, and Ramender Singh, Head of AI Automation & Engineering, Codec Networks. The paper proposes a reference architecture in which a large-language-model agent plans attack paths while deterministic, non-LLM components enforce scope, safety and data protection. Its central commitment is a dual-channel asset representation: the agent reasons only over tokenised asset identifiers and technology descriptors, while plaintext IP addresses, hostnames, URLs and credentials are resolved by a secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway only at the moment of tool dispatch, and never enter the model’s context. The design is organised into seven architectural layers and eight lifecycle gates, positioned as a reference instantiation of the OWASP Autonomous Penetration Testing Standard (APTS) at Tier 2 Verified, Level 3 Semi-Autonomous, and mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF 2.0, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 27001 and 42001, and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025. The paper also sets out alignment with the Information Technology Act 2000, the CERT-In Directions of 28 April 2022 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023.
CERT-In SAMVAD 2026 brought together CERT-In empanelled auditing organisations, regulators and industry leaders. The inaugural session featured addresses by Dr. Sanjay Bahl, Director General, CERT-In; Shri S. Krishnan, IAS, Secretary, MeitY; Dr. Pramod Sawant, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Goa; Shri Alok Kumar, IPS, Director General of Police, Goa; and Prof. Suman Kundu, Director, BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus. The programme included panel discussions with senior officials from the Reserve Bank of India, CRIS, the Bombay Stock Exchange and Airtel Payments Bank, and three parallel technical tracks spanning red teaming, DevSecOps, AI in the SOC, supply-chain security and the auditing of emerging technologies.
Codec Networks’ participation reflects its continuing investment in offensive security research, adversarial simulation and the responsible use of AI in security testing, capabilities delivered to customers through its security assessment, VAPT, red teaming, application and API security, Managed SOC and digital forensics practices.
