Cloud forensics and incident response platform startup Cado Security Ltd. today announced the availability of a new security service catering to application programming interfaces for large language models.

Called Masked-AI, the open-source library enables the safe use of LLM APIs such as OpenAI LP’s GPT-4 without sending out sensitive information. Available as a download from the GitHub repository, it allows developers to use APIs such as OpenAI without worrying about security concerns.

“Masked-AI is an open-source tool that anyone can use to ensure better security and privacy when leveraging OpenAI/ChatGPT, which is especially important in the context of incident response,” said Chris Doman, co-founder and chief technology officer of Cado Security. “As active participants in the security community, this is an impactful milestone for empowering security professionals to respond to threats at cloud speed. This simple yet powerful tool demonstrates that we can use LLMs securely without compromising on the quality of the responses generated.”

Cado Security had previously offered an Interactive Incident Response feature within its platform that uses GPT-3 to streamline forensic investigations and expedite responses. However, the company noted several potential issues with GPT-3 in production environments for the incident response use case, including privacy-related concerns.

With Masked-AI, Cado Security is aiming to foster a community around speeding up incident response in the cloud while leveraging LLM APIs securely to increase the efficiency of security teams.

The service masks individuals’ names, credit card numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, web links and IP addresses. The tool replaces sensitive data with a placeholder and sends the masked request to the API. The solution stores a lookup table locally to reconstruct the API output, then later includes the sensitive data for the user to consume.

The Masked-AI Python software development kit and command line interface tool is a free, open-source companion to Cado’s enterprise and commercial product for cloud forensics and incident response. The new open-source tool has also been integrated with the Cado platform to further optimize and expedite the end-to-end incident response process.

Cado Security was in the news earlier this month when it raised $20 million in new funding for global expansion and product development. Investors in the company include Eurazeo S.A., Ten Eleven Ventures LLC, CyLon Ventures Ltd. and Blossom Capital LLP.

Image: Cado Security