Cisco's open-weight bug busters take on Google and OpenAI

Summary

Security Cisco's open-weight bug busters take on Google and OpenAI Don't call them chatbots Who needs expensive frontier models to find software vulns? Cisco has just released two open-weight models that specialize in finding known bugs in existing codebases. The models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, are part of Cisco’s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face - but only to vetted users.“We’re making sure we’re gating that and appropriately granting access,” DJ Sampath, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform, told The Register.The company is working with academic and nonprofit organizations, as well as smaller and public organizations’ security teams, to ensure they have access to the vulnerability-hunting models. Plus, because both are small models designed to run locally, “you also need the keys to the source code” to scan for and find vulnerabilities, Sampath said. “This means an attacker is going to be able to exploit an endpoint or a service that you have.” It also means that proprietary code never leaves the organization’s machines, compared to cloud-based LLMs that send code to the AI providers’ external servers for processing and analysis. This enables security analysis in environments with strict privacy or compliance requirements, according to the networking and security giant.And yes, it's named after the massive red super-giant star. “It's almost 1,000 times bigger than the sun, even though the sun dominates the sky, and that is the analogy that we're using here for vulnerability detection and localization,” Cisco VP and chief AI scientist Amin Karbasi told The Register. “The impact of vulnerabilities in your codebase is huge, but it might be only a single file or a few lines of code in a million lines of code.”A future, 3-billion-parameter model in the Antares family won’t be released to the public, Karbasi added. “We are completely gating the 3B model to mak...