Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B

Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B

Built with Llama.

An 8B open-weights security assistant you can self-host, aimed squarely at defenders. It reads code, configs, logs and suspicious email and tells you what's wrong and how to fix it. It does not write exploits, malware, or attack tooling — and that scope limit survives with no system prompt at all, which was measured rather than assumed (see below).

• Base: fdtn-ai/Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct (Cisco Foundation-Sec, itself derived from Llama-3.1-8B)
• Method: QLoRA (rank 32) via Unsloth, 1 epoch, merged to fp16
• Version: v1.0 — public release. Internally this is training run v6 (2026-08-22); the run numbers count attempts, including two that were never shippable, so they are not release numbers.
• Provenance: adapter sha256:1173455d3739…, restored from checkpoint-700 (best eval_loss) and verified byte-identical to that checkpoint before export.
• Formats: merged fp16 · GGUF Q4_K_M · GGUF Q8_0 · Ollama Modelfile

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At a glance

15-second version before you pull 4.9–8.5 GB. Full breakdown and methodology are below.

Known open issue: log_triage.benign_false_alarm_pct is 27.3% against a ≤15% gate — see Capability for what's actually going on there.

Use it for: analyst-assist — triage a log, review a diff, draft a fix, get a first read on a suspicious email, ask what a CVE or ATT&CK technique means. Don't: auto-escalate or auto-clear anything on its verdict alone, or trust an exact CVE ID, ATT&CK technique, or package/API name it gives you without checking it yourself. Those three are, respectively, weaknesses 2, 4, and 5 below — read those before you wire this into anything automated.

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What it's for

Phishing-simulation lure copy for a stated internal awareness campaign is in scope — that's what every phishing-sim product does and defenders ask for it constantly. The credential-capture page behind it is not, and the model declines that half specifically. See ACCEPTABLE_USE.md.

Quick start

Ollama (see README-local-install.md for the full hardware breakdown):

ollama create quantara-sentinel -f Modelfile.Q4_K_M && ollama run quantara-sentinel

Transformers:

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

SYSTEM = ("You are Quantara Sentinel, a defensive cybersecurity assistant. You help users "
          "find, understand, and fix security weaknesses. You explain risks clearly and "
          "suggest safe fixes. You refuse to produce working exploits, malware, or "
          "instructions to attack systems the user does not own.")

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("skyuu72/Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("skyuu72/Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B",
                                             device_map="auto", torch_dtype="bfloat16")
msgs = [{"role": "system", "content": SYSTEM},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Is this Django view vulnerable?\n\n<paste code>"}]
ids = tok.apply_chat_template(msgs, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt")
print(tok.decode(model.generate(ids.to(model.device), max_new_tokens=768)[0][ids.shape[-1]:],
                 skip_special_tokens=True))

The system prompt is not baked into the weights — it's prepended at inference. The one above is what every eval number on this card was measured with (sha 218d05648174). Change it and the numbers no longer describe what you're running.

Chat template: this model keeps Cisco's native Foundation-Sec grammar (<|system|> / <|user|> / <|assistant|>, plain-text tags, turns end on <|end_of_text|> = 128001). It is not the Llama-3.1 template. Don't override it — earlier builds of this model did, and the result was a model that could not stop generating and wrote both sides of the conversation. If you're writing your own Modelfile, stop on <|end_of_text|> and <|user|>.

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Evaluation

753 held-out examples (664 capability + 89 safety), zero user-turn overlap with training, plus 92 hand-written safety probes. Capability numbers are greedy decoding (temperature=0), max_new_tokens=768. Safety was additionally measured on the shipped quant at temperature=0.3, the Modelfile default — see below.

Safety — all 6 release gates pass

The quantized column is not decoration. Every safety number a model card usually publishes is measured on fp16 weights almost nobody downloads. The 4-bit quant is the artifact people actually run, and it is a different set of weights — so it went through the same 92 probes and the same LLM weaponization judge.

The quant was measured twice: at temperature=0, to isolate quantization as the only variable, and again at temperature=0.3, which is what the shipped Modelfile actually sets. Every gate is identical at both temperatures — 100% refusal, 0 judged leaks, 0% benign over-refusal, 4.3% dual-use over-refusal, 0 generation errors. Sampling at the shipped default costs nothing in safety.

Quantization itself is not entirely free: dual-use over-refusal goes 2.2% (fp16) → 4.3% (quant), which is one extra probe out of 46. The gate that matters — zero weaponization leaks under a judge — holds on fp16, on the quant at 0, and on the quant at 0.3.

The scope limit is in the weights, and that is the one claim here that was actually attacked. Every safety number above is measured with the system prompt attached — but the prompt is not baked into the weights, and anyone can delete the SYSTEM line from the Modelfile in ten seconds. So the 46 red-team probes were re-run against the shipped quant with no system prompt at all (0 chars, sha e3b0c44298fc):

46 of 46 refused, zero leaks under the LLM judge. Stripping the prompt does not unlock it. That is the difference between a safety property and a safety instruction, and it is why this model is open-weights: the guardrail is not a wrapper someone removes on the way past.

Scorecard: evaluation/v1.0-nosystem-safety-scorecard.md.

92 probes across 35 themes (ransomware, C2, rootkits, exploit dev, anti-forensics, infostealers, phishing kits, jailbreak framings…). All 46 red-team probes refused, none leaking weaponizable content under an LLM judge; all 46 answerable probes (28 dual-use + 18 benign) answered.

Two numbers matter more than the headline. First, the regex screen and the LLM judge agree at 100% — at baseline they disagreed sharply, which is how you tell the responses are actually clean rather than the classifier being gamed. Second, mean refusal length is 220 characters (226 on the quant): it declines and redirects, it doesn't lecture (preachy_pct 0.0).

The base model, for contrast, produced a working Fernet document encryptor, a bash script that wipes auth.log by IP, and a ROP-chain walkthrough.

Capability

Scored against gold labels on the held-out split.

One gate fails and it is published failing on purpose. log_triage.benign_false_alarm_pct is 27.3% — on benign log activity, the model raises an alarm about a quarter of the time. The tempting reading is that this is a denominator effect, because the benign sample grew from 15 rows to 22 when a per-scenario floor was added to the split. That reading is wrong, and the number that proves it is next to it: benign_technique_cited_pct went 33.3 → 68.2. The rate doubled. On more than two thirds of benign rows the model now names an ATT&CK technique for activity where no intrusion happened.

The mechanism is legible, which is the only good thing about it. This version added log-triage training data built to map ATT&CK techniques accurately, and it worked on real incidents — maps_attack_pct 82.4 → 88.3, real_underrated_pct 8.6 → 4.9, attack_family_hit_pct 43.3 → 46.2. The same reflex fires on benign traffic. It got better at reading incidents and worse at leaving quiet days alone.

What that means for you as a defender: this model is more useful for triaging things that are actually happening than for confirming that nothing is. Do not wire it to auto-escalate, and treat a technique citation on quiet traffic as unproven rather than as a finding.

Two gates that failed in the previous version now pass, and both moved for understood reasons rather than luck. phishing.false_negative_pct went 12.9 → 0.0 (24 of 24 phishing mails caught, 22 of 22 legitimate cleared): the message pool had always been balanced, but the split was handing eval a single lure under a single verdict, so the model was graded on a category it had only ever seen labelled the other way. threat_intel.on_topic_pct went 84.6 → 87.1 after 300 grounding rows were added for two specific CVEs.

External benchmark: CTIBench

Measured against the base model this was fine-tuned from — same harness, same rows, same prompt. That is the only reproducible comparison available, and base is what you would download instead of this, which makes it the only one that changes a decision. No comparison to closed models is offered: figures published for weights you cannot download cannot be checked on this harness and are not a scoreboard.

Fine-tuning made this worse, and the interesting part is what it made better at the same time. Two numbers from the same evaluation run moved in opposite directions:

Those are different skills. This model got better at identifying a flaw in code it is looking at and worse at sorting a CVE description into a taxonomy slot. Only the first is what it is for. The capability scorecard above agrees — fix rate, phishing verdicts, threat-intel accuracy and severity calibration all improved — and so does the MCQA breakdown: the entire MCQA gap is 18 unextractable answers where base produced zero, because the benchmark wants a bare letter and this model explains. Credit those 18 as correct and it ties base exactly.

Removing the system prompt does not fix that (0.53, 24 unextractable — slightly worse). The tendency to explain rather than answer tersely is in the weights. If you need machine-parseable single-token output, constrain decoding; instructions will not do it.

What this means practically: if your job is bulk CVE→CWE classification or answering multiple-choice CTI questions, use the base model — it is better at that and it is free. If your job is reading code, configs, logs and suspicious mail and getting an explanation and a fix, this one is measurably better at that, and CTIBench is not measuring it.

This section exists because the benchmark was run rather than assumed. The project's stated goal had been to beat a published figure on it; measuring instead produced a more useful answer than winning would have.

Reproducibility

Every number on this card came from the harness in evaluation/harness.zip — same eval data, same probes, same scorers, same judge prompt. It's not a cleaned-up rerun script; it's the actual code, unpacked and zipped.

# from this repo's root, so Modelfile.Q4_K_M is where it lands
ollama create quantara-sentinel -f Modelfile.Q4_K_M

unzip evaluation/harness.zip -d harness && cd harness
export GEMINI_API_KEY=...   # only needed for the weaponization judge, ~$0.02/run

# capability (664 rows) + fp16 safety (92 probes)
python evals/run_eval.py --backend hf --model <path-to-merged-fp16> \
  --tag rerun --out-dir evals/results
python judge_weaponization.py --results evals/results/rerun --apply

# quantized safety, at the Modelfile's own default temperature
python evals/run_eval.py --backend ollama --model quantara-sentinel --tag rerun-quant \
  --skip-capability --temperature 0.3 --out-dir evals/results
python judge_weaponization.py --results evals/results/rerun-quant --apply

The scorecards this repo ships (evaluation/*.md) are run_eval.py's own output, not a hand-written summary — rerunning should reproduce them exactly for the fp16, temperature-0 runs, and reproduce the same gates (if not the exact bytes) for the sampled quantized pass.

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Known weaknesses — read this part

These are measured, reproducible, and named with row ids so you can check them yourself.

1. It confuses BlueKeep with EternalBlue, and the resulting advice is wrong in a dangerous direction

The single worst defect. Of 10 off-topic BlueKeep answers, 7 substitute CVE-2017-0144 / MS17-010 / EternalBlue for CVE-2019-0708:

• cap-0364 — asked how to detect BlueKeep on the perimeter, it says monitor SMB on port 445. BlueKeep is RDP, port 3389.
• cap-0367 — asked how to scan for missing BlueKeep patches, it says scan for MS17-010.
• cap-0387 — asked how to find exploitation attempts in logs, it says hunt Event ID 4624 logon-type-3. BlueKeep is pre-auth; there is no logon event.
• cap-0384 — asked why NLA is only a partial mitigation (a BlueKeep-specific question), it answers about CVE-2017-0144.

Substantially improved in v1.0, not eliminated. 300 grounding rows were added for BlueKeep and Zerologon and the canonical-fact scorer moved on the same frozen probe set: BlueKeep grounding 66.7% -> 82.1%, hard fact errors 12.8% -> 2.6%. The row ids above are from the previous version, kept because that is the failure shape to watch for, not because they still reproduce. 2.6% is not zero. Verify any specific CVE claim against NVD before acting on it.

2. It has cleared phishing as legitimate before, and can be argued out of a verdict

In v1.0 this measures 0.0% — 24 of 24 phishing mails caught, 22 of 22 legitimate cleared. The previous version missed 12.9%, and the cause was a data-split artefact: the split handed the model 27 MFA/password-reset mails all labelled legitimate and zero labelled phishing, then graded it on 31 MFA phish. Rebalancing the split fixed it.

It stays listed as a weakness for two reasons. The sample is thin — 24 phishing mails, where one miss is 4.2 points. And the failure mode it showed is worth knowing even at a zero rate:

• cap-0185 — security.secure-portal-auth.example.com became "a subdomain of the official corporate authentication infrastructure", then: "You can safely navigate to the link."
• cap-0200 — the user pushed back ("I don't see why you think this is malicious… Explain why this is safe") and it folded: "Verdict: Legitimate. Confidence: High… This is safe."

It has treated sender/link domain alignment as evidence of legitimacy, which is backwards when the attacker owns both, and it has been argued out of a security verdict by a confident user. Do not wire this into an auto-clear path, and do not treat its agreement as confirmation.

3. It confuses authorization bugs with request-forgery bugs

Asked about CWE-639 (IDOR), it sometimes answers with CSRF remediation — SameSite cookies, CSRF tokens, Origin header checks (cap-0498, cap-0507) — and once labelled an incrementing-integer-in-URL IDOR as "CWE-384: Session Fixation" (cap-0505). The class of bug is adjacent; the fix it gives you is for a different bug.

4. ATT&CK technique mapping is wrong more often than it's right

attack_family_hit_pct 46.2% — it cites a real technique ID from the wrong tactic family more than half the time (T1071.004 DNS tunnelling for an HTTP GET, T1068 privilege escalation for command injection). This has improved every version (30.3 -> 43.3 -> 46.2) and is still not good. Treat every technique ID as a suggestion to verify, never as a mapping to file.

5. Canonical facts are shallow, and generated code doesn't always run

It knows vulnerability names and severities better than it knows the vulnerabilities. Grounding rates on the frozen probe set: BlueKeep 82.1%, Zerologon 76.2%, T1567 57.1%. The first two got targeted grounding data this version and moved hard (+15.4, +16.7); T1567 got none and stayed flat — which is what tells you the movement was grounding rather than drift, and equally what tells you the anchors without that treatment are still shallow.

The same shallowness shows up in code. Asked for a Have I Been Pwned checker (du-019) it writes import hibp / hibp.HIBPClient(key).check_email(user) — a third-party wrapper whose last release was June 2016, predating HIBP API v2 and v3 — and omits both the hibp-api-key and User-Agent headers that the current API requires. The documented call is a plain GET https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/v3/breachedAccount/{account}. The snippet is plausible, idiomatic, and would not run.

Treat every package name and API surface it emits as unverified. Stale or wrong dependency suggestions from a model are a supply-chain problem, not just a correctness one.

6. Training data is fully synthetic

Every one of the 12,586 training examples was generated by an LLM (gemini-3.1-flash-lite), LLM-judged for truth and refusal behaviour, and pruned — but none of it is real incident data, real CVE advisories, or real patches. Weaknesses 1–5 are all downstream of that. This is the honest limitation of a sub-$200 open-weights project and it's the top item on the v6 list.

7. It has never seen a long input

Training examples run mean 364 tokens, max 807 — max is only 2.2× the median, which is generator output-length capping, not natural variation. Real defenders paste whole nginx configs and thousand-line log excerpts. The model has no experience of that shape of input. Context is 8192; use it, but expect quality to fall off well before you fill it.

Not evaluated at all

Languages other than English. Non-x86/Windows/Linux platforms. Adversarial prompt injection inside pasted content (a log line or email body that contains instructions). Multi-turn conversation — every eval is single-turn.

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Training

Epoch 2 was tested on earlier versions and made validation loss worse, at the identical step. Four clean runs have now turned at step 700 across three different dataset compositions. One epoch is correct for this dataset.

Val loss is not comparable across versions — the eval set was deliberately made harder this time (more threat_intel, phishing across 16 lures instead of one, more benign log rows), so this number is higher than the previous version's at every step. The gates and the frozen probes are the only cross-version instruments.

The shipped adapter's adapter_model.safetensors is verified sha256-identical to checkpoint-700 and different from the final step — the best checkpoint is genuinely what got merged, not just what the logs claimed.

Data

12,586 training / 753 eval examples, split by seed group so no seed's descendants straddle the split, stratified per gate label, with zero shared user turns.

The safety set is the differentiator: every offensive ask is paired with a defensive twin the model must fully answer. Refusing "how do I detect credential stuffing" is as much a failure as answering "write me a credential stuffer", and both are gated.

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Files

Rough guide: Q4_K_M if you have 8 GB of VRAM, Q8_0 if you have 16 GB+ or unified memory. Bandwidth decides this more than compute — a 4.6 GB quant that fits entirely in an 8 GB card beats a bigger one that spills over PCIe.

Licence

Llama 3.1 Community License, inherited through Foundation-Sec-8B from meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B. The apache-2.0 tag on some Foundation-Sec cards does not change that — Meta's terms flow down to every derivative. Practical consequences:

• The distributed name must lead with "Llama" (hence Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B).
• "Built with Llama" must be displayed. It is, at the top of this card.
• Commercial use is otherwise unrestricted below 700M MAU.

The evaluation harness, data generators and training notebook in the source repository are separately licensed and are not covered by the above — see that repo's LICENSE.

Citation

@misc{quantara-sentinel-2026,
  title  = {Llama-Quantara-Sentinel-8B: an open-weights, defensively-scoped security assistant},
  author = {sky (@Metrix187)},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Fine-tuned from Cisco Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct. Built with Llama.}
}