Security<\/p>\n
Don’t call them chatbots<\/p>\n
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\u2019s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face<\/a> – but only to vetted users.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re making sure we\u2019re gating that and appropriately granting access,\u201d DJ Sampath, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform, told The Register.<\/p>\n The company is working with academic and nonprofit organizations, as well as smaller and public organizations\u2019 security teams, to ensure they have access to the vulnerability-hunting models.<\/p>\n Plus, because both are small models designed to run locally, \u201cyou also need the keys to the source code\u201d to scan for and find vulnerabilities, Sampath said. \u201cThis means an attacker is going to be able to exploit an endpoint or a service that you have.\u201d <\/p>\n It also means that proprietary code never leaves the organization\u2019s machines, compared to cloud-based LLMs that send code to the AI providers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n And yes, it’s named after the massive red super-giant star. <\/p>\n \u201cIt’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,\u201d Cisco VP and chief AI scientist Amin Karbasi told The Register. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n A future, 3-billion-parameter model in the Antares family won\u2019t be released to the public, Karbasi added. \u201cWe are completely gating the 3B model to make sure that we responsibly release it to communities that need it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Small yet mighty<\/p>\n