Model Card for CiscoAI/SecureBERT2.0-code-vuln-detection

The ModernBERT Code Vulnerability Detection Model is a fine-tuned variant of SecureBERT 2.0, designed to detect potential vulnerabilities in source code.
It leverages cybersecurity-aware representations learned by SecureBERT 2.0 and applies supervised fine-tuning for binary classification (vulnerable vs. non-vulnerable).

Model Details

Model Description

This model classifies source code snippets as either vulnerable or non-vulnerable using the ModernBERT architecture.
It is fine-tuned for code-level security analysis, extending the capabilities of SecureBERT 2.0.

• Developed by: Cisco AI
• Model type: Sequence classification
• Architecture: ModernBertForSequenceClassification
• Number of labels: 2
• Language: English (source code tokens)
• License: Apache-2.0
• Finetuned from model: cisco-ai/SecureBERT2.0-base

Model Sources

• Repository: https://huggingface.co/cisco-ai/SecureBERT2.0-code-vuln-detection
• Paper: arXiv:2510.00240

Uses

Direct Use

• Automatic vulnerability classification for source code snippets
• Static analysis pipeline integration for pre-screening code risks
• Feature extraction for downstream vulnerability detection tasks

Downstream Use

Can be integrated into:

• Secure code review systems
• CI/CD vulnerability scanners
• Security IDE extensions

Out-of-Scope Use

• Non-code or natural language text classification
• Runtime or dynamic vulnerability detection
• Automated patch generation or remediation suggestion

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

• The model may overfit to syntactic patterns from training datasets and miss logical vulnerabilities.
• False negatives (missed vulnerabilities) or false positives (benign code flagged as vulnerable) may occur.
• Training data may not include all programming languages or frameworks.

Recommendations

Users should use this model as an assistive tool, not as a replacement for expert manual code review.
Cross-validation with multiple tools is recommended before security-critical decisions.

How to Get Started with the Model

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

# Path to the model
model_dir = "cisco-ai/SecureBERT2.0-code-vuln-detection"

# Load tokenizer and model
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_dir)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_dir)

# Example input code snippet
example_code = """
static void FUNC_0(WmallDecodeCtx *VAR_0, int VAR_1, int VAR_2, int16_t VAR_3, int16_t VAR_4)
{
    int16_t icoef;
    int VAR_5 = VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].VAR_5;
    int16_t range = 1 << (VAR_0->bits_per_sample - 1);
    int VAR_6 = VAR_0->bits_per_sample > 16 ? 4 : 2; 
    if (VAR_3 > VAR_4) {
        for (icoef = 0; icoef < VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].order; icoef++)
            VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].coefs[icoef] +=
                VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].lms_updates[icoef + VAR_5];
    } else {
        for (icoef = 0; icoef < VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].order; icoef++)
            VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].coefs[icoef] -=
                VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].lms_updates[icoef];     
    }
    VAR_0->cdlms[VAR_1][VAR_2].VAR_5--;
}
"""

# Tokenize and run model
inputs = tokenizer(example_code, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, padding=True)
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    logits = outputs.logits
    predicted_class = torch.argmax(logits, dim=-1).item()

print(f"Predicted class ID: {predicted_class}")

Evaluation

Testing Data, Factors & Metrics

Testing Data

Internal validation split from annotated open-source vulnerability datasets.

Factors

Evaluated across:

• Programming language types (C, C++, Python)
• Vulnerability categories (buffer overflow, injection, logic error)

Metrics

• Accuracy
• Precision
• Recall
• F1-score

Results

Summary

SecureBERT 2.0 demonstrates the best overall balance of accuracy, F1, and precision among the compared models.
While CyBERT achieves the highest recall (detecting all vulnerabilities), it suffers from low precision, indicating many false positives.
Conversely, CodeBERT exhibits strong precision but poor recall, missing a large portion of true vulnerabilities.
SecureBERT 2.0 achieves more consistent and stable performance across all metrics, reflecting its stronger domain adaptation from cybersecurity-focused pretraining.

Environmental Impact

• Hardware Type: 8× A100 GPU cluster
• Hours used: [Information Not Available]
• Cloud Provider: [Information Not Available]
• Compute Region: [Information Not Available]
• Carbon Emitted: [Estimate Not Available]

Carbon footprint can be estimated using the Machine Learning Impact Calculator.

Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

• Architecture: ModernBERT (SecureBERT 2.0 backbone)
• Objective: Binary classification
• Max sequence length: 1024 tokens
• Parameters: ~150M
• Tensor type: F32

Compute Infrastructure

• Framework: Transformers (PyTorch)
• Precision: fp16 mixed precision
• Hardware: 8 GPUs
• Checkpoint Format: Safetensors

Citation

BibTeX:

@article{aghaei2025securebert,
  title={SecureBERT 2.0: Advanced Language Model for Cybersecurity Intelligence},
  author={Aghaei, Ehsan and Jain, Sarthak and Arun, Prashanth and Sambamoorthy, Arjun},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00240},
  year={2025}
}

Model Card Authors

Cisco AI

Model Card Contact

For inquiries, please contact ai-threat-intel@cisco.com