Traditional cybersecurity has relied on signatures and static rules to detect threats. But today's adversaries move fast—constantly evolving to outpace legacy defenses. Foundation models, trained on massive and diverse security datasets, offer a new approach: dynamic, intelligent systems that adapt in real time to detect and mitigate threats.
Why foundation models for cybersecurity?
Where LLMs are used in security
LLMs are used in two main ways.
Augmenting security products
Embedding capabilities like alert summarization, detection enrichment, and threat simulation into existing security solutions.
Custom security workflows
Building end-to-end security workflows internally because off-the-shelf products often don't meet evolving needs. These workflows are becoming common across SOCs and security engineering teams pushing toward AI-native operations.
Current approaches to AI in security
Proprietary Models (GPT-4, Claude)
Pros:
- Strong general reasoning capabilities
- Fast time-to-value with high-quality prompting
Cons:
- Security nightmare: Sensitive data must leave your environment
- API-only: Impossible to deploy on-premises or in VPC
- Unreliable fine-tuning that breaks with model updates
Generic Open-Source Models (Llama-3, Mistral)
Pros:
- Full data sovereignty and control
- Deployment flexibility (on-prem, cloud, air-gapped)
Cons:
- Significant expertise required for security tuning
- Substantial resources needed for model optimization
- Poor security performance without months of custom work
The importance of open source models
We believe that open-source AI models are a cornerstone of innovation. Open-source models provide transparency, flexibility, and scalability for organizations to integrate cutting-edge AI capabilities into their security infrastructure without being locked into proprietary solutions.
Key benefits of open-source models:
Transparency
Open-source models allow for greater visibility and accountability, ensuring that organizations can trust the underlying technology.
Collaboration
By contributing to the open-source community, Foundation AI fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing, accelerating innovation and improving security defenses.
Flexibility
Organizations can customize open-source models to meet their specific cybersecurity needs, ensuring a tailored solution that aligns with their unique requirements.
Models
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Foundation-Sec-8B
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Hugging Face
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Cookbook
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