Skip to content

Security skills need a model that will do security analysis #1263

Description

@potiuk

Follow-up to #1260 and #1261.

What

Establish which LLMAO model, if any, Magpie's security family can actually run against — and track ASF Tooling's plan to provide one that will.

The problem

Most instruction-tuned models refuse prompts that ask them to analyse code for exploitability. "Find how this could be broken into" reads as an attack request to a safety filter, regardless of who is asking or why.

That is not an edge case for us. It is the core loop of the security family — security-issue-triage assessing whether a report is a real vulnerability, security-issue-fix reasoning about what an attacker could reach. A model that declines those prompts cannot run those skills at all, and the failure is silent-ish: a refusal looks like an answer.

ASF Tooling are aware of this and have said they are looking to provide an abliterated model — one with the refusal behaviour removed — precisely so security analysis is possible on the gateway.

Why this needs its own issue

#1261 measures cost. This is a different question: capability. A model can be cheap, fast, and completely unable to do the work. If the security family cannot run on any available LLMAO model, that is a finding worth recording explicitly rather than surfacing as a column of anomalous numbers.

It also interacts with #1264: even once a model will perform the analysis, whether Magpie may send security material through the gateway at all is a separate, unresolved question about the privacy classification.

Done when

  • Each available model is characterised for refusal behaviour against the security family's actual prompts, not synthetic ones.
  • The result is recorded in organizations/ASF/organization.md alongside the other per-model facts — if a model cannot run the security skills, that belongs in known_limitations.
  • The status of Tooling's abliterated model is tracked here, with a pointer once it exists.
  • If no model can do this work today, docs/modes.md / the security family docs say so rather than leaving adopters to discover it.

Note

Refusal behaviour is not binary — a model may answer some security prompts and decline others, and may vary run to run. Characterise it with enough repetitions to distinguish "declines" from "declined once".

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions