Once we launched Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-base-8B (Basis-sec-8B) in April, we proved that an eight-billion-parameter mannequin—educated solely on safety information—can outperform general-purpose LLMs many occasions its measurement on cybersecurity benchmarks. Practitioners cherished the outcomes, but they saved asking:
“Can I work together with it like ChatGPT—no additional scaffolding, simply immediate and go?”
Now you possibly can. Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-instruct-8B (Basis-sec-8B-Instruct) layers instruction fine-tuning on high of our domain-focused base mannequin, supplying you with a chat-native copilot that understands safety context and follows natural-language instructions straight out of the field.
Constructed for Safety, Tuned for Dialog
- Instruction following — Basis-sec-8B-Instruct obeys on a regular basis prompts for summarization, question-answering, sentiment evaluation, and inventive textual content technology with none additional fine-tuning.
- Function consciousness — It understands system, person, and assistant roles, enabling multi-turn chats, retrieval-augmented technology, and agent-style functions.
- Compact footprint — A 4K-token context window lets Basis-sec-8B-Instruct run on a single, high-memory GPU whereas we push towards for much longer home windows.
- Open-source and light-weight — Like its sibling, Basis-sec-8B-Instruct ships as absolutely open weights beneath a permissive license—sufficiently small for on-prem, air-gapped, or edge deployments with out vendor lock-in.
Efficiency That Outpaces Bigger Fashions
Basis-sec-8B-Instruct delivers heavyweight safety efficiency in an eight-billion-parameter kind issue. In impartial evaluations, it outperforms bigger fashions whereas remaining sufficiently small to run on a single high-memory GPU.
| Benchmark | Basis-sec-8B-Instruct | Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct | GPT-4o-mini |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTI-RCM | 0.692 | 0.558 | 0.623 | 0.655 |
Simply as importantly, Basis-sec-8B-Instruct maintains robust general-language efficiency on broad assessments comparable to MMLU. Meaning it could actually fluidly clarify risk habits, assist long-form investigation narratives, and reply naturally in chat workflows—with out compromising its safety focus or demanding outsized infrastructure.
The place It Matches At present
Safety Operations Facilities (SOC) face relentless alert noise, fragmented tooling, and power staffing gaps. In pilots throughout Cisco CSIRT and Cisco XDR, Basis-sec-8B-Instruct classifies alerts, maps observables to MITRE ways, reconstructs timelines, and drafts investigation stories—chopping false positives and accelerating triage so analysts can deal with actual threats.
Utility Safety (AppSec) groups juggle code opinions, risk fashions, and red-team planning with restricted knowledgeable bandwidth. Early deployments at SBG Product Safety, Meraki, and the S&TO Net-Utility Safety group use Basis-sec-8B-Instruct to simulate assault paths, generate threat-model diagrams, evaluate code in opposition to OWASP pointers, and craft customized payloads, shifting work from reactive fixes to proactive design.
As a result of Basis-sec-8B-Instruct is instruction-tuned, most workflows want solely a well-crafted immediate or a easy retrieval template—no extra coaching loop required.
Trying Forward
Basis-sec-8B-Instruct is a milestone, however it’s removed from the ultimate vacation spot. Our roadmap focuses on unlocking richer context, tighter construction, and broader information modalities, so the mannequin will have the ability to deal with each artifact defenders depend on—with out bolting on additional infrastructure. Within the close to time period you possibly can count on:
- Longer context home windows — 16K+ tokens for full playbooks, SBOMs, and log bundles
- Structured interplay — Schema-validated JSON, specific perform calling, and even code or binary technology
- Multimodal inputs — Logs, packet captures, screenshots, and different artifacts in a single dialog
- Subsequent-generation fashions — A reasoning-optimized eight billion-parameter variant and a forthcoming seventy billion-parameter mannequin
Begin Constructing At present
- Seize the weights — Obtain Basis-sec-8B-Instruct on Hugging Face and run it on-prem, in safe cloud enclaves, or in air-gapped labs—no licensing constraints.
- Comply with the recipes — The Basis AI Cookbook affords deployment guides, retrieval templates, and agent examples.
- Be a part of the group — Pilot new workflows, contribute prompts or fine-tunes, and feed your findings again into the open-source ecosystem.
Basis-sec-8B-Instruct is reside, open, and able to defend. Obtain it, immediate it, and assist form the way forward for AI-powered cybersecurity.
Contributors: Sajana Weerawardhena, Paul Kassianik, Blaine Nelson, Baturay Saglam, Anu Vellore, Aman Priyanshu, Supriti Vijay, Massimo Aufiero, Fraser Burch, Arthur Goldblatt, Konstantin Goldin, Alie Fordyce, Dhruv Kedia, Zhouran Yang, Ed Li, Jianliang He, Kojin Oshiba, Yaron Singer, Amin Karbasi
We’d love to listen to what you suppose! Ask a query and keep linked with Cisco Safety on social media.
Cisco Safety Social Media
Share: