Toward Lightweight IoC Extraction in IoT: The Role of Small Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The proliferation of cyber threats necessitates rapid and accurate extraction of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) from diverse security data sources. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in natural language processing and information extraction tasks, their deployment on resource-constrained IoT devices remains challenging due to computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates whether Small Language Models (SLMs) can serve as effective alternatives to LLMs for IoC extraction in IoT environments with limited resources. We present a novel direct LLM-based IoC extraction system leveraging context memory mechanisms for document-wide semantic understanding, specifically designed for deployment on edge computing infrastructure with consumer-grade hardware. Our experimental setup utilizes an RTX 4080 GPU and Ryzen 7 7700X processor running the Ollama framework with GPT-OSS:20B model to evaluate the feasibility of using smaller models instead of resource-intensive LLMs for security tasks. Evaluated on 9 diverse threat intelligence reports spanning different malware families and attack campaigns, the system achieved an average F1 score of 0.62, precision of 0.54, recall of 0.79, and accuracy of 0.85, demonstrating that SLMs can achieve acceptable accuracy levels for IoC extraction while operating within the computational constraints typical of IoT edge deployments. The results suggest that smaller models may provide viable alternatives to large language models for distributed threat intelligence processing in resource-limited environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".