NCCoE Invites Comments on Internal Chatbot Report

The NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published NIST Internal Report (IR) 8579, Developing the NCCoE Chatbot: Technical and Security Learnings from the Initial Implementation.

The public comment period for the publication will close at 1:59 pm (AEST) on August 45, 2025.

The NCCoE identified a potential application for a chatbot to support its mission and developed a secure, internal-use chatbot to assist NCCoE staff with discovering and summarising cybersecurity guidelines tailored to specific audiences or use cases.

The chatbot was built using retrieval-augmented generation-based LLM technology. This approach combines techniques from information retrieval and natural language generation, enabling the chatbot to provide more focused, contextually relevant responses by leveraging a repository of cybersecurity knowledge, including previous NCCoE publications. Compared to search engines, LLM-based chatbots provide more contextually relevant and precise responses by understanding the nuances of natural language queries.

This report provides a point-in-time examination of the NCCoE Chatbot, outlining the NCCoE’s approach to developing the tool and its response to specific security challenges. In addition, it provides an overview of the chatbot and its supporting technologies so that other organisations might consider the benefits of their use.